rallamajoop

More of an intermediate epilogue to the events so far than a real chapter, but a milestone nonetheless, because here - seven chapters and over a year into the process - we reach the end of what is, in my mental map of this thing, the end of part one of sub-section one of the massive sprawling epic that shall eventually be this fic.

I really need to start writing faster.

Also, because I completely forgot this last time, I need to take a moment to plug the awesome (not to mention awesomely NSFW) art

inheavenlygrass drew for the first chapter of this epic. It is rather more appropriate to the content of this chapter anyway.

Title: Good Intentions
Summary: Deadpool thought killing that 'Nathan' guy was going to be a fairly routine job. He couldn't have been more wrong.
Chapter: 7/?
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool, X-Force, plus reference to past Cable/Domino
Rating: NC-17 (over all), PG (this part)
Word Count: 3855
Previous Parts: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

Cable woke late the following morning, feeling his age in a way he never did. The new synth-skin over his left cheek pulled uncomfortably as he rolled over and fumbled for the light; it always took a few days to loosen up when it was new, leaving him half-smiling or half-grimacing at the world. Better than bare metal, at the very least.

It might have been nice to have had some period of forgetfulness to wake up to this morning, but sleep had hardly dulled his recollections of yesterday's excitement—Deadpool, Copycat, Domino, betrayal in more flavours than one person should face in a year, let alone a matter of hours. Against the confrontation with Tyler though, it all paled into insignificance. In the harsh light of morning it was harder to be sure he'd been telling the truth when he'd told Tyler that his relief at finding his son alive came before all else, when he couldn't begin to guess what scars all those years as Stryfe's puppet might have left on his body and soul. He didn't know if there was going to be a way to save Tyler from this, or how much of his son might be left to find when he did. Maybe the greater relief would have been to discover Tyler really had been put out of his misery all those years ago.

It wasn't a chain of thought he was nearly awake enough to deal with, or to avoid.

Coming back to the past should have been a way to put some distance between himself and past failures; a new start in a part of history where his influence could still make a difference and no-one would know his name. Instead, he'd found himself in the midst of an unplanned reunion with a father he'd never known, a mother who never birthed him, a sister who would be sent ahead to found the very order that raised him in her twilight years, a clone who'd followed him from the other end of time, and a son he'd thought long dead. Everyone was back here—all except Aliya, doomed by the misfortune of being a Summers only by marriage rather than birth.

In that moment he found himself missing her more than he'd known how to miss her in years.

Someone thumped loudly on his bedroom door. "Nate, are you up? It's after ten." The voice was Domino's, and he resented the intrusion for all of the three seconds it took for him to recognise that if ever he'd needed distracting from his own thoughts, he needed it now.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and looked down at himself. It wasn't as though Dom would mind walking in on him half-dressed. "Barely. Come in anyway."

The door swung open to reveal Domino silhouetted against the brighter light outside, looking little healthier than she had the previous day. She gave the room a cursory glance and stepped inside.

"I wasn't expecting you to beat me out of bed this morning," said Cable.

"I would've said the same yesterday, but it turns out my souvenir of Tolliver's basement is having my sleep cycle shot to hell. I woke up three times thinking I was back there." Domino screwed up her face in distaste.

"I'm just glad we found you alive." On a better day that might have been more than he would've cared to admit out loud, but it was shaping into the kind of morning when it paid to count your blessings. Domino gave him a sharp look but didn't comment on this show of sentimentality.

"You can thank Tolliver for being so obsessed he couldn't even kill you without making sure he'd have someone to gloat to afterwards," she said, starting to pace restlessly along the length of the bed. "There's more behind this than how the Khyber job went bad. Whatever the fuck he's after you for, this has never been business. This is personal."

"I'd gathered." Domino had known him too long not to know what an answer that clipped meant, but the sound of her feet advancing businesslike towards him stood as evidence that she wasn't about to let this go so easily.

"Well I hope you have, Nate," she said, shoving herself inside his guard and holding his eye, "because this isn't over." Eye contact being a two-way street, this was as far as she got before something made her hesitate, and Cable found himself treated to a startlingly immediate minds-eye view of exactly how haggard he looked. By the time he made it back to his own head it was to the sight of Domino backing off a step. For a long moment both of them found other things to look at.

"Look," said Domino after slightly too long, tone milder, "I don't know if I even want to know the sordid details about whatever it was you did to get his attention, but I'm not saying it's you deserved it either. The man is unhinged. It's either going to be him or you and everyone who ever knew your name."

You would have had to have been Cable to appreciate the years of association buried in that statement—it was a long way from apology, but it was Domino all over. Though she'd probably side with him against anything up to the heavens themselves, she'd never be able to watch him so much as stub his toe without wondering what he'd done to bring it on himself. "Trust me, Dom. I suffer from no illusions about where things stand with Tolliver."

Domino let out a huff, but seemed ready to accept that on this topic he was determined to be enigmatic. "Then how about we talk something closer to home then—how things stand with that little spy, for example?"

Copycat. Still cooling her heels in the Danger Room until they figured out what to do with her. "It's on my list for this morning."

"Well, you can save yourself the trouble. I dealt with her already."

"You what?!" The words weren't out of his mouth before he was halfway to his feet. Domino waved him back down.

"At ease, soldier. You don't get to write her off as a past tense issue yet. She and I had a little chat, girl to girl."

Cable rubbed two fingers over his brow. Five minutes out of bed and already he had a whole new kind of headache coming on. "Did you learn anything to your advantage?"

"Just that Tolliver likes his people malleable and with more issues than New Scientist," said Domino, tone bitter enough to bite. "She's a mess, Nate, and I'd wager he'd only get credit for the layer on the top."

"Really."

"Raise you an 'unbelievably'. We've landed ourselves the world's first shapeshifting mole with identity issues."

That particular revelation failed to make the impact it probably deserved. Weighed up against his own impressions of the shapeshifter, if anything it was a little too easy to believe, and if even Domino had noticed, that said a lot. "She still has her share to answer for."

"To a shrink, maybe."

In the back of Cable's mind there was a part of him still tuned to look for anything 'Domino' said that would give her away as a fake, and even with all real suspicion done away with, it was occurring to him that perhaps he should be wondering whether there could be something more behind Domino's sudden expression of sympathy. "That's unexpectedly prescient of you, under the circumstances."

"Your sitrep is a few hours out of date," said Domino, "Look, Nate, we both knew I walked in wanting nothing more than to rip her a new one with my nails. But there's just no satisfaction in beating something that battered."

To hell with subtlety, Cable decided. "Just making sure I'm not going to walk in on her later and find her 'proving' her psychosis by taking your form and insisting she's the real Domino and that the fake walked out this morning."

The edge of Domino's mouth quirked upwards. She angled a finger at her head. "You want to make sure? Take a good long look. The memories you want start about an hour ago."

Cable took the invitation and, well beyond the easy question of identity, was surprised to learn just how accurately Domino had represented the encounter. He followed them as they fought, came to a stalemate, and finally settled down to talk, drawing out with a wince only when they started talking about him.

In real time, Domino was still smirking at him, and likely only more for guessing where he'd stopped. Cable considered and rejected three different things to say in his own defence before giving it up as a lost cause.

"Didn't hold much back, did you?" he commented, failing to keep as far as he'd have preferred from the inevitable double-entendre.

Domino gave an easy shrug. "I got out of Tolliver's dungeon wanting nothing more than a warm body to take all those lost months out on. But I'm going to have to settle for a steak the size of my face and your promise I'm going to get a solid month sleeping on a feather mattress so thick you'll have to dig me out of in the morning."

That drew out more than its share of memories. "The kind you always used to hate when we were living on the hotel circuit?"

"The very same."

"Do you want me to promise you that steak too?"

"Sure, any time you're off the babysitting roster." This last remark confused him until she added, "I have to say, Nate, when you mentioned your new 'team', I was expecting a few more faces old enough to shave."

The truth of that was that you didn't tell an old friend you wanted to reassure that you'd brought your 'students' to rescue her, but that didn't mean they deserved to be written off so easily. "They're not so much younger than you or I were when we got into this business."

Domino raised her eyebrows. "One kid makes a good team mascot, but seven? That makes a school trip. Don't the X-Men don't have a problem with you recruiting their kids?"

"Things have changed while you've been away, Dom. What you're standing in now is what's left of the X-Mansion." That got him her attention. "Basement level, if you want to know. The X-Men have other issues on their minds lately. Someone had to step up to fill the vacuum."

The word 'mid-life crisis' fluttered through Domino's mind. She shook her head. "And what do the kids think of that?"

"They have their share of growing up left to do," Cable admitted, "but they follow me by their own choice. They all expected to become X-Men someday. My outfit isn't so very different."

"And here I thought I was going to get another of your 'for the good of the future' explanations," said Domino, a hand on one cocked hip.

"Well. That too."

"What about that mercenary—what's his story?"

"Deadpool?" Blunt honesty was usually the last resort in Cable's arsenal, but sometimes it did little harm. "Tolliver sent him to kill me; I made him a better offer. In less than twenty-four hours since he joined us he's identified an enemy agent in our numbers, lead us to one of Tolliver's bases and helped me rescue a very good friend. I'm calling that a good investment. Is that a problem?"

"Honestly?" said Domino, "I don't think I'm going to like him much. I've known him all of a hour or two and I can already tell there's things going on there I don't want to know about, but I'm so far past ready for a gig where I get to work with a familiar face that I'm not feeling that picky. Your team, your call. And unless you have something you need your whole team for right now, it looks like I have an appointment with a stack of old newspaper four months thick."

If that was hardly glowing endorsement, what stood out was that nowhere in anything Domino had just said had the idea of working alongside Deadpool been rejected out of hand, and from the back of Cable's sleep-addled brain, something in that triggered an alarm bell. Only when he'd had a moment to gather his thoughts did it sink in that this wasn't the same Domino who'd objected to hiring Wade. This Domino—the real Domino—was making her very first judgement on the subject known.

"What are you smiling at?" the real Domino asked him, after he'd been quiet a moment.

Cable found her looking back at him from the doorway. "It's good to have you back, Dom," he said.

By now, Domino had had long enough to catch on to the fact she'd caught him in a sentimental mood, so if that flattered her she hid it quickly. "Say that after you see the bill on that steak you owe me."

"I will."

"Ch. You old softy," she called around the door frame, and was gone.

Cable was still smiling when Deadpool appeared in it a minute later.

"You're in a good mood," he said, flatly. "Why does that give me the screaming heebie jeebies?"

If there was context that would make this make sense, it was escaping Cable at the moment. "Conscience bothering you?"

"Not since we nailed up that 'no junk mail sign'," said Deadpool, which explained exactly nothing, though it did buy Cable the time for a particular detail from events gleaned from Domino's mind to remind itself to him.

"Perhaps you could help me with something," he said. "I hear Domino got into the Danger Room this morning.

"Well tie me in ribbons and shimmy me backwards up the maypole, was that a 'thankyou' I just heard?"

"I locked that room for a reason, Wade," said Cable, eyebrows twitching upwards.

"A reason? Ooh, do I get twenty questions or am I stuck with three guesses and the option to buy a vowel? Wait, don't tell me—I get it, but Nate—oh my Natey-Nate, you zany old fool you, you didn't and notice you'd gone and locked the door with one of them on the wrong side, and here's all of us standing around too embarrassed to be the one to let you know. Will the whacky hijinks never stop?"

"Wade..." Cable warned.

"Oh come now, Boss, we're men of the world, you and me!" Deadpool declared, leaning against the door frame. "We know the only way to deal with a couple of broads with their panties in a bunch over a little case of she said/she said is to break out the trusty ol' gun-totting hillbillies method of conflict resolution: you lock 'em all in a room and stand well back until the problem has taken care of itself."

Conflict resolution. Of course that would be his excuse. "That may be a better theory if the consequences of them not settling their differences quickly didn't include one of them ending up dead."

"Either way, problem solved!" said Deadpool cheerfully. "And don't even get me started on the savings we made on therapy bills."

"So you let Domino in entirely out of concern for their own good?" asked Cable, already knowing the skepticism would go right over Deadpool's head, even if he had to duck to make it happen.

Deadpool pointed a finger at his head. "Do you doubt this face? Incidentally, do you realise that the kitchen is completely out of microwave popcorn and your schmaltzy holodeck doesn't have a single pre-set mudwrestling program? For shame, Boss, how do you expect people to work under these conditions?"

Cable hesitated. Deadpool, meanwhile, ploughed straight on.

"What? You weren't expecting me to get the whole thing on tape, were you? I know it's not everyday you get to see two badass, buxom babes fighting it out over you in a featureless metal room that refuses to reconfigure into a field of jello no matter how many buttons someone tries, but that's what security footage is for."

Cable concentrated hard on keeping his hands away from yet another new knot of tension in his brow and reminded himself again of what Domino had told him when she'd walked in before. There were going to be times ahead when he'd have to push Wade on calls not so different from this one—if it came to that, to remind him very firmly of who was in charge—but this wasn't one of them.

"Nate?" said Deadpool, what may have been the faintest sliver of the smallest trace of uncertainty creeping into his voice.

"Thank you, Wade," Cable pronounced. "It wasn't the means I would have chosen, but I can't deny the situation seems to have turned out for the best."

That much cleared up, it took Deadpool all of a nanosecond to recover and move on. "Great, so seeing as little miss tall, pale and splotchy is still with us, what's up with that? Are you on a share-time arrangement now?"

It struck Cable that despite all they'd been through, he'd known Deadpool for the sum total of a few hours, and this roundabout approach to communication he favoured would take some getting used to yet. "Pardon?"

"I'm talking about my perks, Boss," said Deadpool. "You remember my perks—that clause about the hot-and-cold running amenities you threw into the deal to incentivise me over the line? Because when I signed up I had the idea I was going to have exclusive access to the bump'n'grind machine, not that I'd be here two days before I found my perks had got switched out for one of those employee-of-the-minute rotating prize pool programs."

Something clicked in Cable's head, and it was a something owed less to anything Deadpool had just said than to the return of the tone of voice from when he'd first shown up in the doorway that morning sounding inexplicably betrayed by the sight of Cable in a good mood. A good mood he'd been left in after his conversation with Domino, who Deadpool must have seen leaving Cable's bedroom. Now his reaction was starting to make sense. "You think I'm going to make you share me with Domino?"

"Excuse me? Are you the one with the problem with the saying things out loud thing now? I know how this one goes, Boss, it's a classic for the ages!" The bitterness in Deadpool's voice was rising with every syllable now. "Merc meets merc lady under a silvery moon, the fireworks go off—or maybe that was the C4, who knows, who cares, the earth moved for them and so what if that was mostly the shockwave. Time goes by, merc realises the starter fuse ain't firing up their partnership the way it used to, merc breaks it off with merc lady, merc throws himself at the next merc man to come flying through the doorway looking like he might be up for a bit of candlelit mayhem for two. But then we hit the surprise twist! Merc-man reveals that merc-lady was really mole-lady all along! Merc rescues merc-lady, looks deep into those soleful, high-contrast eyes and realises where the starter-fuse was hiding all along..."

Cable followed all of this with an increasing sense of unexpected delight. Forget counting your blessings, when he'd given up on finding anything worth celebrating this morning, now, bare hours into their... arrangement, Deadpool came and handed him this? "You're jealous."

"And the spandex makes your butt look big," Deadpool snapped back. "Ain't nothing here throwing any sissy-girl feelings out of joint, we had a deal Boss, and I need to know you're gonna make good on it."

"Wade," said Cable, not even trying to keep the good humour out of his voice, "I wasn't sleeping with Vanessa when I thought she was Domino. Why would you think that would change now?"

"Boss, 'think' is such a weasel word. Does Pepe le Pew think his latest amoré is going to turn out to be a black cat with a little case of the mange? Does Wile E Coyote think his new ACME gadget is going to burn off his eyebrows? Of course, if they were seeing the show from my side of the fourth wall-"

"Are you always such an optimist or am I catching you on a good day?"

"Hello? Did someone sleep through nineteen-ninety?" The sense he was being laughed at was not improving Deadpool's mood. "Wake up and smell the napalm boss, grim, gritty and realistic is in."

Cable tilted an eyebrow at him and shifted his posture on the bed to a very deliberate lounge. "Is there going to be anything I can say that will reassure you?"

Deadpool actually pouted. "...well, you could tell me all about how much better I am in bed than she is."

"Wade," Cable crooked a finger at him. "C'mere."

Jerking through every step like a puppet fighting its strings, Deadpool crossed through most of the distance between them.

Cable let his smile widen. "I'm glad you brought up your contract. You've just reminded me how many of your own terms you broke yesterday by leading us to Domino."

"If you're going for flattery," said Deadpool, arms folded and nose pointed deliberately off towards a corner, "my weak-spot is a little lower than where you're aiming-"

"I'm getting there. You know, I was just telling Domino how pleased I am in how this particular investment has paid off."

"You do mean me, right?" Everything in Deadpool's voice suggested a man still hunting for the catch.

"Who else?" If Deadpool went on ignoring the obvious invitation in his posture much longer, this was going to get frustrating.

"Oh shitsteaks, I've been here two days, I'm fresh out of ex-employers to double-cross and I've gone and given the Boss expectations about my performance figures."

"Wade. All I'm saying is that I'm very pleased with what you've done for us since signing up. So pleased that I thought it would be appropriate to let you decide what reward you'd like."

That finally got him Wade's full attention. "You mean, now?"

"My plans for the morning started and ended with dealing with that Domino/Copycat situation. Seems I have a window free." And if Cable hadn't earned the excuse to enjoy himself a little this morning, he never would. He reached a hand out to trail over the fabric covering Deadpool's thigh; the shiver of anticipation he was rewarded by seemed to run through the both of them.

A few last twitches in Deadpool's neck seemed to mark the end of a losing battle for the defensiveness he'd come in with. "Anything?" he breathed.

"Within reason. I draw the line at another round with saliva."

"Wuss," said Deadpool. "But, anything else?"

Cable decided he very much liked the promise in those words. A couple of telekinetic nudges were all it took to shut and lock the door.

"Why," Cable asked, running his hand inwards, "what did you have in mind...?"

Chapter 8