Chapter Text
The address was a building clad in scaffolding in Hudson Yard, just outside of where the Daredevil sightings stopped and the Spider-Man sightings began. Logan stood down the street from it in street clothes, watching people go about their business.
“Yeah, I’m just getting some milk,” Logan said, holding his elbow down so that he reduced his blind spot.
Wade’s voice crackled over the phone. “You’re not going to take thirty-two years to do it, right? That’s the same excuse my dad gave.”
“I’ll be back soon. If I’m not you can call the police. The good ones, not the ones who arrested you.”
“Okay, well if you decide to get distracted by a dive bar I’ll come get you, but only after I hit up every thrift store in Harlem to see if they have a waffle maker or any information about the Rebanes. Sound good?”
“Fine.”
“Bye, Poptart. See you later.”
Logan lowered the phone and hung up to the sound of Wade going ‘muah’ over and over again.
Unlike everywhere else in Manhattan, that street was quiet. Really, it was almost abandoned. All of the parking metres were used and there were still people walking around, but it was clear that many of the buildings went unused or were more of a weekend scene. The only indication that something strange was happening was the fact that the door Logan had been tipped off about was wide open.
A person stopped beside him. Logan looked down at Hawkeye. She looked back up at him.
“Hawkeye says you’re bad news and I should stay away from you,” she said to him. She was carrying a large case over one shoulder and a smaller case at her hip, like one you might put a bottle of water in if you wanted to be really extra about it. “Do you think you’re bad news?”
Logan watched as a man walked into the dodgy building. The man entered the dark doorway with a kind of determination in his step, disappearing into the shadows, and then emerged looking confused. He walked into the road a little bit, going around a parked car and then snapped back to himself, got on the sidewalk, and walked away.
“Hey, claws. I’m talking to you.”
“Hawkeye, why does it matter if I’m bad news or not?”
“Well.” She pointed to a finger on each hand as she talked. “You clawed at least two people to death, you evaded Natasha’s glare of doom, you lied to her and Hawkeye in their faces without flinching, and Lucky didn’t climb up on you and demand pets.”
“The dog was more interested in trash than in me.”
Hawkeye considered this. “Alright. That’s fair.”
“You want to do me a favour?” Logan asked.
“I’m not leaving.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you to leave,” Logan said, and she brightened. “I was going to ask if you had your bow with you, and if you felt like covering for me.”
“Covering you?”
“Yeah. Most of these buildings are empty, but I’m going into that one—” he pointed. “And I want you to make sure that no one with guns or other weapons gets out to pester people on the street.”
Hawkeye bounced on her heels a little. “Hmm. Okay. Let me just climb the building opposite—”
Logan grabbed her arm. “You’re not enhanced, right?”
“No?”
“Are your parents enhanced, either?”
“No, why?”
“Is that a ‘no, I’ve asked and they’re not enhanced’ or is that a ‘no, I’ve never asked and it’s never come up’?”
Hawkeye crossed her arms. “Does it matter?”
“If you’re enhanced, or the child of an enhanced person, I think the people in that building would be really eager to drain all of the blood out of your body and turn it into performance enhancing drugs. Now I’m asking again, are you or your parents enhanced?”
Hawkeye stood up a bit straighter. “No.”
He let go. “Good. Whatever you do, don’t follow me in.”
Hawkeye seemed more confused than concerned. “If I hadn’t seen you eat bullets that one time, I’d say no, but…okay.”
Waiting for Hawkeye to get into position, Logan continued to stare at the building. It wasn’t too tall, maybe only six floors, but looked like it went back a long way and lacked windows inside. Many of the buildings in New York also had a basement or five, and he didn’t relish the idea of going down into one if he didn’t find anything on the upper floors.
Hawkeye gave Logan a two-fingered salute and Logan responded with one of his own, and then began his walk into the mouth of hell.
As suspected, the building was dark. He stepped in as far as he could before needing to stop and let his eyes adjust to the darkness, blinking rapidly, and he examined the first floor.
It was a wreck, to put it nicely. Broken glass littered the floor, along with trash, papers, overturned furniture and random crap from the street, like empty palettes and spare tires. It was the kind of place Logan could see being closed off by plywood if the police ever got a hold of it, and it made him wonder what had stopped them so far. Other than perhaps a group of mind controlling mobsters.
It was also quiet. Despite being in the middle of New York, it was empty of human life. He had expected at least a few homeless people to have made their way inside, but the telltale signs of their existence were missing. No cardboard on the floor, no smell of unwashed bodies, and no drug paraphernalia. The last time he’d encountered a place like it, Logan had been in the middle of the countryside examining a large abandoned railway station which had been previously used in a farming community, but with trucks and cars becoming so common, it had been abandoned in favour of the new vehicles.
Logan walked around the space. Like the previous place, the one the Punisher had cleared out, it was large and open. Red brick beams broke up his eyeline, but he eventually saw the stairs at the back.
Upstairs was similar, but darker. The scaffolding outside was doing a great job of obscuring the already dirty windows and Logan needed to squint to see much of anything. The smell of rats was stronger up there, but along with it came the faint smell of human beings. From the outside it had seemed like the building was at least six stories, but inside he couldn’t see another set of stairs.
A flicker of movement to his left caught his attention and he snapped towards it, stilling, but there was no-one there. Through a broken window, a thin sheet of plastic twisted and coiled like a snake being held by its tail and, sure enough, when Logan looked the scaffolding outside had stairs. Despite being high up, the smells of people — breath, sweat, fear — were stronger still. He stepped outside onto the wooden boards and tried not to look down.
It was almost silent in the building. Pigeons cooed outside. This was the point of no return.
The scaffolding was solid beneath his weight and Logan entered the third floor through a window, and finally, there was a sign of life. A man in a long, black trench coat was somewhat close to the window, standing motionless. Logan paused, remaining very still as he looked at the man, but he wasn’t able to see further into the building on account of there being some temporary walls in place. However, everything told his other senses that there were lots of people around.
“Hey,” Logan said softly, loud enough for the man to hear him but quiet enough to hopefully not attract any attention. The man didn’t move. Logan stepped a little closer. “Hey, you.”
Walking slowly around the man, Logan was struck by two things: first, the skull haphazardly painted onto the man’s bulletproof vest, and second, by his sickly orange eyes. It was the same kind of orange you got on certain poisonous mushrooms, and a colour he hadn’t seen either in normal humans or victims of mind control before. Even when Logan was in the man’s eyeline, he didn’t seem to realise Logan was there.
He also couldn’t help but notice the tacky temporary walls made from PVC fabric, each with a company logo which read ‘Rebane’, and below it, ‘Oscorp’.
He grunted, his tongue rolling over his canines. So the spat between the Laothian and Estonian mobs was a cover, or at least the excuse the Laothian mob gave to Wade to justify hiring him. Either them making assumptions or wanting to get him to shoot them up as a threat, rather than a good reason. The real question was why this ‘Rebane’, whether it was a company or a person, was working in abandoned buildings instead of a fancy Oscorp building. Oscorp hadn’t exactly made their stance on human testing public, but there was enough bad press to make the assumption that they weren’t totally against it.
Still, using children seemed to cross most people’s lines.
Creeping through the doorway into the rest of the third floor, Logan paused.
People. Countless people. All of them were between the ages of maybe five and twenty-five, and they operated in pairs. Lines of what looked like dentist chairs occupied the gloom, each bolted to the floor and occupied by one young person while the other worked on taking blood from them, and all of them had the same unwell orange colour in their eyes. Logan watched the pair closest to him as they sat and stared into space, waiting for the blood to drain out of the one in the chair while the other just sat there, seeming to think about nothing at all.
Logan walked past them. There wasn’t a lot he could do at that time to help them out, and mind control had always been a tricky thing to break, in his past experience. Sometimes all you had to do was kill or entrap the conductor and all of their victims would drop like puppets with their strings cut, and other times you had to free each person individually.
And why was Logan immune? Honestly, even God couldn’t tell Logan the answer to that question. Perhaps he’d suffered through enough bullshit that he finally caught a break.
All at once, the young people who had been idle lurched into action. Logan flinched as they moved, but they didn’t address him, instead pulling cotton wool out to press against the wound, withdrawing the needle, capping off the bags of blood, helping the ones in the chair remove their tourniquets, and then they swapped places. The ones who had been in the chair stood, some of them being a bit wobbly, before they walked in single file up the stairs to the next floor, and to Logan’s astonishment, more young people came in single file down the stairs. They sat down opposite the ones in the chairs and began the process of taking blood.
Weird. Officially weird, and disturbing.
There were kids with horns, kids with wings or big eyes or webbed fingers, and kids with blue-tinted skin and kids with their school backpacks still strapped to their back. The older ones seemed to be dealing with the treatment okay, but the youngest kids, the ones who looked too young to spell their names properly, were beginning to wither.
Logan went upstairs.
This was the first time someone looked at him properly since he entered the building. A person in a lab coat looked up at him, then down at her microscope, and then back up again when she realised what she was looking at. Like everyone else, she had orange eyes, but her movements weren’t robotic and sterile like the children’s were, and she opened her mouth to scream.
“Dr Luther!” she yelled.
Other scientists' heads popped up, all of them in white lab coats and all of them with the orange tinge in their eyes, but Logan was very, very grateful that they just stood there in their panic rather than try and hurt him or run around like headless chickens. He was less pleased, however, when a woman floated in through a broken window holding Hawkeye by the neck.
“Oh,” she said with a smile, “company!”
Hawkeye was limp, but he could see the orange tint to her eyes as well, and the lady holding her was in the running for worst super villain outfit of the year. First off, she had the hideous fake blonde hair of someone who was slowly going grey, and it was cut with a side bang which wrapped around the side of her face. This ‘Dr Luther’ was also wearing a pair of colourful exercise leggings, a lab coat, and a low-cut t-shirt which showed off her various cheap necklaces. Visually, she seemed like the kind of person who would call the police on the girl scouts— wait.
“Dr Luther?” Logan asked.
The woman came closer, showing off her pearly white veneers. “Yes?”
The children were officially upstairs. The crazy lady must have thought Logan was a cheap party trick rather than someone outright dangerous, since she came closer to him, dragging Hawkeye over as well.
Before Logan could speak, he felt a sort of… prod. A metaphysical prod. Dr Luther’s eyes lit up.
“Ah.” She dropped Hawkeye. “Finally, someone who doesn’t age. Come with me.”
Dr Luther must have been stupider than she realised, and Logan took full advantage of that fact as he followed her across the room. All of the scientists with their orange eyes stepped to one side as she floated over to another dentist's chair on the other side of the room.
“Dr Luther?” he asked again, walking over. This had to be a joke. Surely the lady realised he wasn’t affected at all by her weird mental magic.
She seemed annoyed that he was still talking. “Take a seat.”
“Dr Karen Luther,” Logan said slowly, “my friend doesn’t appreciate you scamming him with a sandwich maker.”
The woman’s eyes went wide, but she was too slow, and Logan jammed six claws into her abdomen before she could realise her stupid voodoo shit wouldn’t work. She choked, coughed, and Logan let her slide off of his claws and onto the floor in a bloody heap.
“Dumbass,” he muttered.
All of the scientists were staring at him. Their eyes stayed orange.
Sighing, Logan went over to the closest scientist who didn’t seem perturbed for Logan to be so close. “I don’t suppose you know how to snap you people out of this?” Logan asked. The scientist stayed silent. “No? I’ll give it my best shot, then.” And he slapped the scientist around the face.
The orange flickered out of the scientist’s eyes like a broken christmas light as he gasped, stumbling backwards. The other scientists all watched the first as he checked to make sure his face wasn’t broken, feeling his cheeks, and he looked up at Logan. “What was that for?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Logan asked.
“You fucking hit me.”
Logan rolled his eyes. “Before that.”
“There was— we.” The man went quiet. “We were let go from Oscorp in a big group.”
“Your company?”
“Yeah, our company: Rebane. Paul, you tell him.” The scientist looked up at his fellow scientists and seemed to realise that something was deeply wrong with them.
Logan sighed. “I’m going to call the cops.”
*
The man who had been downstairs, who turned out to be none other than Frank Castle AKA the Punisher, had seemed to break out of his own mind control and had left the building by the time the cops arrived. What must have been half of the Force turned up to apprehend Logan, cuffing him, but it was Brett Mahoney who took his statement.
“So what clued you in to this building in particular, Logan?”
“A Spider-Man told me.”
“Which one?”
“Peter Two.”
Mahoney gave him a weird look, so Logan elaborated. “There’s three Peters and one Miles. They number themselves.”
“Right, and—?”
They were cut off by a small shout and Pietro crashed into Logan at forty miles an hour.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!” Pietro cried. “Oh my god, I thought i was going to die! There were these two dudes in an alley, and they were by the bodega, and they saw me running, and then they were like ‘you’re not seeing the sun again’ and I kept getting flashes outside of the mind control, and I thought I was going to die, and they kept taking my blood and—” he went all woozy. “—I hate needles. Oh my god.”
Pietro peeled himself away from Logan and wiped his eyes with his dirty sleeve. It was ripped to expose the elbow on both arms, but Pietro just seemed pleased not to be inside that dusty building any more.
“Speed, huh?” Logan asked.
Pietro nodded. “And you, uh. Why are you handcuffed?”
Mahoney got their attention by clearing his throat. “Logan stabbed the person responsible six times. It’s probably going to be framed as self defence, but…”
“To be fair, kid, I’m the only alive person here who’s covered in blood.”
The three of them seemed to come to a kind of understanding and they nodded, and Mahoney called over a different officer to take care of Pietro. Logan could see Officer Morales and Miles hugging it out on the other side of the street, and there were countless children and adults all being fed, watered, and encouraged to sit down for a while.
Fortunately, it seemed like there were going to be no permanent injuries, and whatever they were doing to create the drug was in the hive mind of orange tinted mind control rather than something the scientists knew off by heart.
“How did you know that Karen Luther was interested in keeping you there, rather than sending you away immediately?” Mahoney asked.
Logan shrugged and lied. “I didn’t.”
Mahoney raised an eyebrow. “And how did you know she’d fall for it?”
“Honestly, detective? She seemed really fucking stupid.”
*
Life mostly returned to normal. Four Spider-Men patrolled New York, a devil operated in Hell’s Kitchen, the Avengers defeated a giant statue which only moved when no one was looking at it (which was a really bad design over all, considering how many people refused to look away from it since it was a cool, giant statue), two Hawkeyes shot people with bows and arrows, a man with a grey pitbull, a bulletproof vest with a skull painted on it and an attitude problem thanked Logan by mailing him a grenade and some cigars, and Brett Mahoney got Logan’s number so that he could call in the event of them needing Deadpool for some very specific circumstances.
It was December before he knew it, with snow falling every other day and the bitter chill of wind whisking away any of the warmth most people held onto like a lifeline. The buildings which the Rebane company had been operating in were closed off and there were plans to turn them into apartments.
It was Pietro’s night off, and Logan had wished the kid a happy Christmas since he wouldn’t see him until December 29th, and it was quiet. Music came through the radio, old classics by Sinatra, and it kept Logan company as he made his way through a copy of ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’.
As the clock struck midnight, announcing the arrival of Christmas Eve, two men walked through the door. The blonde man was built like a brick shithouse, and the comparatively smaller man was dressed in a suit which probably cost as much as a house, but he smelled like mechanical grease. They both came up to the counter and Logan put the book down.
“You want a sandwich?” Logan asked.
The smaller man spoke up. “Logan Howlett?”
Alright, so it was business, not pleasure. “What’s it to you?”
“I’m Steve Rogers,” the beefcake said, “and this is Tony Stark. Our friends Natasha and Clint said you worked here.”
“I thought you were supposed to be dead?” Logan asked Tony Stark.
“Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” Stark said. “We’re here to ask you to reconsider joining the Avengers. A man by the name of Nick Fury said he didn’t have much luck talking to you and asked us to stop by.”
“You want a sandwich or what?” Logan asked.
Steve Rogers stepped forward again, like he was trying to be intimidating. “Sir—”
The front door opened again, and in stepped a normal, dweeb-like man, a woman with short blonde hair, and a dude made of fucking rocks wearing a fedora and a trenchcoat.
“Richards, I swear to God,” Stark said, “we got here first!”
“Where’s Johnny?” Rogers asked. “I thought you were the Fantastic Four, not the Tolerable Three.”
The dude made of rocks spoke up. “He’s busy right now, ditching fire for a shield, secret agents, and some mild treason.”
Rogers’s face soured.
Stark stepped forward. “Look, buzz off, Grand Pabbie. We were here first and we’re going to negotiate our terms first.”
The door opened again. Ororo Munroe stepped inside and held the door open for Scott Summers, and, er…
“We’ve got a ramp, hang on,” Logan said, and disappeared into the back room.
Returning, Logan handed the ramp over to Rogers, who handed it to Scott, who put it down on the step so that Charles Xavier could come in on his wheelchair. Suddenly, with the room filled with macho muscle and impressive minds, the bodega felt quite small.
“Good work on the Rebane case,” Scott spoke up.
Logan nodded and said nothing.
“We were here first, and we’re going to talk first,” Stark said. “The Avengers could use your kind of investigatory skills and other fighting abilities on our side. Spider-Man said your work was exceptional, Hawkeye believes you’re solid, and you’ve managed to befriend just about every ground-level hero out there, as well as a few hundred enhanced kids.”
Rogers interjected, “You’ve proven time and time again that you’re on the side of good, and the Avengers are always looking for new talent.”
Logan looked between the two of them. “On your official roster you’ve got two ex-Nazi agents, two world-class spies, an alien who viewed us all as insects up until 2011, a guy with anger issues who destroyed half of Harlem, a dude with fake wings, a billionaire in a suit, the billionaire’s friend in a suit, and a guy who is made from some kind of computer which was one connected to a purple guy who wanted to end all life as we know it. Oh, and a walking flag. I’m not interested. Next!”
The normal looking guy who Stark called Richards eased in. “Look, Logan. I get it. I appreciate it. You’re looking for something casual and something which is more local, right? The Fantastic Four is a great place for people who want to make a difference because we work in the city and we protect against very real, non-spies-and-terrorism threats. You’d be a real asset to our team.”
“I’m not sure how Johnny ended up in the void, but if he was in any way associated with you three, I want nothing to do with it. Next!”
Charles Xavier came up to the counter. There was a long, difficult silence between them before Charles nodded.
“Alright, that’s quite enough. I’d like a ham on rye with lettuce, tomatoes, red onions, pickles, and salad cream. I know that I can’t recruit you, Logan, but please know that we’d always be happy to have you back with us, and you can bring Deadpool, too. Any mutant, enhanced, or otherwise powered person who passes your checks is sure to have some amount of good in them, even if they’re—”
There was a loud crash from the back room. “Plum pudding?”
“...Deranged,” Charles finished.
“Insane?” Stark added.
Sue Storm spoke up for the first time since she entered. “Oh, we’ve got to go.”
Logan turned away from the peanut gallery and watched Wade walk into the bodega, in full costume, and when he saw Logan watching him he posed in the doorway, kicking one leg up to show off his flexibility.
“Oh, honeybun, you get sexier every time I see you.”
Logan shrugged and went to wrap the sandwich he had been making for the Professor, but when he turned around he realised that he and Wade were alone in the bodega. It was like the other people had never been there, and the only evidence was the wheelchair ramp someone had kindly placed beside the door.
Wade slid behind him. “What have you been up to on this fine, cold, wet, snowy night?”
“Not much. There were a bunch of people just now who I had to ask to leave, but you took care of it.”
“They were scared of me? Even though I hadn’t even shown my face?”
“You didn’t see them?”
“No. That would be too convenient and the author isn’t so kind. Why? Who were they?”
Logan shrugged, wrapped the sandwich in paper, and handed it to Wade. “A few famous faces. Tony Stark, Steve Rogers…”
Logan began listing them and Wade’s jaw visibly dropped, even with the mask on. By the time Logan had mentioned them all, Wade was left in stunned silence and made occasional choking noises like a snake taking on too much. Unable to resist, Logan reached out and closed Wade’s mouth for him.
“The Avengers?” Wade clarified, voice quiet and squeaky. “And the X-Men and the Fantastic Four?”
“Yeah.”
Wade made a noise like a deflating balloon.
“Babygirl.” Wade came and wrapped his arms around Logan in a hug. “Peaches. Wolverine, my sweetest summer. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Thinking about it, Logan shrugged. “You know. Bit of this, some of that. Different things to you, but…”
Wade’s hand drifted down to his ass. “Are you suggesting that we’re just as fucked up as one another?”
With a deep, pleasant sigh, Logan let his claws dig into Wade’s sides and Wade moaned. He admitted, “We’re not dissimilar.”