Chapter Text
Danger-ous Liasons
Team Briefing, Serval HQ
Lorna stood at the top of the table, clicker in hand, showing her team a PowerPoint presentation.
“Okay, we've got a real scumbag to take down this time,” she announced, the disgust obvious in her voice. “Kenny Fawkner, age 36, CEO of RedLight, online porn billionaire,” she continued, pointing to a picture of a smug-looking man. “Lately it's been revealed that most of his income is through illegal webcam hacking and revenge porn. The authorities can't do anything because he hosts his servers off-shore. It's our job to hack into his database and find out where these servers are, and destroy them for good.”
“And what exactly are we all going to contribute to dis?” asked Gambit.
“Cypher, Warlock and Danger are to infiltrate his HQ and find the location of the offshore servers. The rest of us will wait for the co-ordinates and fly out there. Gambit, you are good at blowing things up, so this should be a straightforward run.”
Doug raised his hand, “How are we going to infiltrate the building? What's the security like?”
Lorna smiled, “It won't be hard, you'll be going at night so there will only be their security systems to get past. I'm sure that will be no trouble at all between the three of you.”
Warlock smiled ear-to-ear (literally) at this news. A mission! A real mission with minimal danger for him and his selfsoulfriend! He knew Doug was always very sensitive to how he was treated by the teams he was on, and to finally have a job where he was useful would definitely boost his confidence.
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Later that evening, RedLight HQ
So they had gotten into the building, that was a start. Doug and Warlock used their powers to figure out where the main server was. Danger was keeping a look-out and using her hard-light holograms to sneak them past security cameras. In the main server room now, Warlock interfaced with the system with one arm, and changed his other arm into a kind of laptop computer for Doug to start hacking. Filled with silent glee, Doug typed furiously to bypass security and find out where RedLight's secure data servers were.
“There, I've tracked them to the Cayman Islands, downloading the exact co-ordinates now,” Doug relayed over his earpiece.
“Roger that Cyper,” came Polaris's reply from the other end. “Now just be careful getting out and they'll never know what hit them.”
Doug pulled out his flash drive from Warlock's arm and nodded to let him know he could stop interfacing with the server. Warlock quickly shifted back into his normal form and stood up, looking around carefully.
“Selfriend, I can't see Danger,” Warlock said, trying to hide the panic he was starting to feel all of a sudden. Doug caught his meaning after a few beats. “Seeing” for Warlock meant a far longer range of distance and spectrums than the human eye. To lose sight of Danger when they had been not 20 feet away from her previously was strange.
“Danger, do you copy?” Doug hissed over his earpiece. He didn't have to wait long for a reply, which came in the form of gunshots ringing out in the distance.
“We have been discovered! Retreat!”came Danger's voice. Before Doug had time to wonder how, Warlock had picked him up and was running towards the door. No time to argue here, as armed security guards came running at them down the hallway from both directions. Warlock hesitated, forming a shield around Doug and trying to analyse the best way out of this situation without hurting anyone. Before he had a chance to act, the floor underneath him smashed upwards, and a blue blur pushed him through the wall in front of him.
Warlock rolled to a halt and saw that Danger was behind them putting up a shield against the bullets now being fired their way. “Jump!” she commanded, and Warlock saw the window of the building behind them. They were 50 floors up, but that was no concern. What he didn't expect was the grenade that came rolling to his feet.
With no time left, he threw Doug through the window and formed a shield with his body over the grenade. He braced himself for the explosion, as Danger sped past him out the window.
Doug was falling from the 50th floor of a building. Luckily his Serval uniform had protected him from the glass as he rocketed through it, but it wasn't going to help him fly. “Not again,” he thought as he started to fall towards his doom. The heat of an explosion just reached him as a blue metallic streak caught up to him and caught him before he was even half-way down.
“Danger!” he managed to choke out, as she spread her wings and carried him gently down to the ground. “Is Warlock- ??”
“I'm going to get him out now,” she replied, shooting back up into the sky. Doug tried to see what was happening at the top of building, but there was too much smoke now.
“Cyper, can you hear me?” came Polaris's panicked voice. “What's happening?”
“We got caught, but Danger got me out, but Warlock is...” Doug's voice caught in his throat in panic. Had the explosion been strong enough to hurt 'Lock badly??
Moments later, Danger came back, this time with a frayed Warlock in her arms.
“'Lock! Are you okay?!” Doug cried, frantically grabbing at what appeared to be a limb of some sort.
“Self will survive, but self needs lifeglow,” came a disjointed reply as Warlock tried to shift back into a more humanoid form.
“That will have to wait for now, we need to get out of here before we are spotted,” Danger implored, taking both Warlock and Doug in each arm, back into the sky.
As she soared over the sky, lit pink and orange by the rising sun, Doug reached out to Warlock's frazzled form. The early morning sunlight filtered through Danger's lattice wings, and sparkled off Warlock's jagged edges.. Doug wasn't sure if it was the concussion talking or not, but he suddenly felt at peace. 'Take some of my lifeglow,' he said through his link to Warlock. Warlock was too drained to argue, so he melded with Doug's hand, and took a small amount of energy through Doug's fingertips. Just enough to bring himself back into a less nightmarish mess of fractals. Doug's smile was so kind at that moment.
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Back at Serval HQ, later that day.
After arriving back at Serval, the medics had inspected Doug and Warlock before pronouncing Doug was fine but slightly concussed, and that they didn't have a clue in the world what to do with Warlock. Luckily Warlock knew just what to do, and teleported back to Techno Inc, where he could replenish himself on their cruelty-free lifeglow source. Sure, he would probably end up with a lecture from his Siredam, but it was worth it to be back in action quicker. Meanwhile, Danger was left to take the heat from the rest of the team.
“How did they detect you? This was supposed to be an easy mission,” asked Quicksilver, pacing back and forward, irritated. Their plan to destroy the illegal server was now in jeopardy.
“I believe they had some Stark Tech, or something similarly advanced,” Danger responded coolly. “A normal security system would not have been able to see through my holograms.”
“I say we blow dem up anyway,” offered Gambit. “We got de location after all.”
“No, it's not good timing now,” sighed Polaris. “They might be expecting us and they have probably moved on again. It's time to re-think the plan. Everyone is dismissed for now.”
Pietro was out the door before anyone could even see him, and Remy plodded out after him.
“Lorna,” started Danger, uncharacteristically unsure of herself. “I'm sorry for what happened back there. I take full responsibility.”
“Don't worry, these things happen,” Lorna said back, twisting one corner of her mouth into a grim smile. “The main thing is that no-one got seriously hurt, which is the best we could hope for.”
Danger watched Lorna leave, and went back to trying to process what had happened earlier. Not just what went wrong, but the reactions of her team mates. Why had Warlock thrown Doug from the window instead of just jumping with him? She processed the estimated explosive power of the grenade, the velocity of Doug's fall and how quickly she had responded. There was something missing in her equation- did Warlock think he wouldn't be able to absorb the force of the explosion if he was holding Doug? There was only a slim chance of that, less than 4%. Not logical at all. Unless...
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A few days later, Serval HQ.
“So like, what is your relationship with Warlock anyway?” asked Danger over the X-Factor dining table.
Doug looked up at Danger, his mouth still full of pancake and swallowed hard. Suddenly his mouth felt dry, despite how much maple syrup he had drenched his breakfast in.
“Your pulse is speeding up,” Danger prodded, her inscrutable gaze bearing down into Doug's rapidly paling face.
“Why this all of a sudden?” he managed to choke out, quickly downing some orange juice to try to clear his throat. Nothing ever seemed to go right when Danger started asking questions. He didn't want to be rude as she had saved his life a few days earlier, but this kind of question was not the kind he wanted to answer.
“Well, I thought it was interesting that he has been flirting with me... if you could call it that... when it appears he already has a partner,” Danger drew her fingers together and rested her chin on the table. Doug felt ill.
“'Lock didn't mean it like that,” Doug began to explain, remembering how 'Lock had run away from Danger, distraught after his date invite had quickly escalated into her propositioning him for sex. “He's just not like that.”
“Are you 'like that', Doug?” Danger seemed to be moving ever so imperceptibly closer.
“What? No, wait, like what?” Ohshitohshitoshit.
“Are you two lovers? He cares so deeply for you, even if he appears to be pursuing me lately,” she put matter-of-factly.
Doug had never had his relationship status questioned outright before. He and Warlock were... selfsoulfriends. It was too complicated to explain any other way. More than friends, but what else? They shared a body, a code, a life. As for his sexuality... Doug often fell in love, but he wasn't exactly sexual. Warlock wasn't even close to human in that respect, so it denied any label he knew of.
“I am going to leave the room now,” Doug announced, standing up with his plate of pancakes and backing away.
“Hmm,” Danger sighed as she watched him leave. She hadn't even propositioned him directly yet, and he had already run away. She needed to work on her game.
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Working for X-Factor was a pretty good gig for Doug. The other team members had, after all, saved his life and reunited him with Warlock. Now he also had something to do to take his mind off recent events that had happened when he was still a part of the New Mutants. Warlock was just happy to be by his side, he knew that much. Every day he felt guilty for what he had done to poor Warlock when he left. He couldn't even be slightly angry or even a little creeped out about the monitoring device in his chest. For all he knew Warlock had already installed another one, but it didn't matter. He was just glad that they were together too.
He always felt a warmness whenever Warlock was near. Emotionally, it made sense, but it was more than just that. It was something to do with his code. It was miraculous really, that being infected with the T/O virus hadn't had any consequences for their relationship. When he was younger, not knowing much about the Technarch life-cycle, he feared if he became infected he would have to fight Warlock to the death. Warlock had laughed at this later, comparing it to a human thinking they would become the child of someone they had sex with. The conversation had gotten awkward after this because Doug didn't know if he had had the Technarcy version of “sex” with Warlock by soul-merging with him. Some things were just too personal to ask an alien, or something like that.
But the warmth... code speaking to code? He wondered. Whatever Warlock had done to him through Illyana's transmoded Soul Sword had cured him of Selena's influence, but had re-written parts of him in a way he still didn't understand. Perhaps it really was just magic, and he shouldn't think about it. The power of love? It almost made him blush. But the reality was probably that now they were so similar that they were not complimentary in their relationship, but two halves of the same being. Delving back inside each other, down to the smallest nook and cranny, every cell and atom linked... that was far more intimate than any human form of sex could be.
All these thoughts ran through Doug's head as he sat in his bedroom, finishing his breakfast away from Danger's prying. She could probably see through walls, but that was besides the point. What was her deal anyway?