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Julian manhandles Virgil out of the room, yanking him back by his hood and smacking him when he bares his teeth in a glare. Virgil falls to glowering after the blow, stops struggling so his cousin doesn’t hit him again. “What are you doing?” he snaps. “We’ve got to evacuate, you heard her. The heroes are coming here.”
“Yup, and that’s where you come in,” Julian says, looking at him like he’s a moron. “C’mon, Vee. You know none of our powers’ll match up to theirs. Take a look and see.”
Virgil does, against his will; he’s been told when and how to look so often that not doing it when ordered makes him brace for pain. Like most supervillains, Manticore doesn’t have a lot of patience for disobedience. Especially not from an ambitious minion’s baby cousin.
Lilah, throwing fire at Goldeye and getting hypnotized, letting the fireballs fall and burn her up instead. Vince breaking into a run and getting hit by falling debris. Julian burned and bloody, caught in the crossfire or killed when he tries to shoot Panacea and his partner objects.
Virgil feels the blood drain from his face. “You die,” he says, and Julian tenses, even though he’s heard that prediction a million times. “If you try to shoot Panacea. And you can’t go after Goldeye or Panacea heals him before it even slows him down.”
“Yeah, see?” Julian looks a lot more grim all of a sudden, easy smile robbed of friendliness and humor. Usually Virgil can count on some amused tolerance from his older cousin, the one who took him from his aunt and uncle’s house when they stopped bothering to feed him and said he found something better to do than school- who promised him a place to stay if he’d use the ability he tried to hide for something besides avoiding bullies or the creepy gym teacher. Now he stifles the urge to shrink back. “We don’t have a lot of options here, kid. You can see that, can’t you?”
“I don’t see good scenarios,” Virgil reminds him for the thousandth time. “There could be something we can do, it doesn’t always mean we’re doomed-”
“There is something we can do,” Julian says, and doesn’t let go of Virgil’s wrist. He feels a queasy dread start up under his breastbone, anxiety recognizing patterns and bringing up the fear early, just in case.
“You know I can’t control that. I’d have to be really close, and even then there’s no guarantee I’d even hit the right target before I get caught or killed or- or something .” Virgil’s breath is already coming short. He digs in his heels. “Jules-”
His cousin whirls around and hits him harder, almost knocking him off his feet. Virgil thinks he might cry out; he gasps back stung tears, righting himself, and Julian snaps, “We don’t have time for this. You’re just gonna have to take one for the team, okay? Save the rest of us. Didn’t you always say you wanted to be a hero?”
Julian is gripping his wrist tight enough to break it, if Virgil struggles. He knows from experience.
His cousin takes his shocked silence for acquiescence and drags him into the main lab-- the one used for weapons development. Virgil pauses, gazing around; he’s never been allowed in there before, though he’s seen it sometimes in visions. “What am I doing?” he ventures, hoping stupidly that Julian has some kind of extraction plan, some way to make this okay.
“Boss said they’re looking for the stuff in this lab,” Julian says. “He made it from studying that one guy, you know, Morpheus? Goldeye’s pissed about it.”
Virgil has to fight not to flinch at that name. Morpheus. The guy with sunglasses and a valley girl accent, who snarked the whole time they interrogated him and called Virgil pipsqueak the two times he saw him, even though the second time he was barely conscious. Virgil remembers scouring the worst case scenarios for the vigilante every hour, seeing all the ways he could end up dead or mutilated and hanging around the others to overhear whether any of his premonitions came to pass.
God, he doesn’t even know if the guy’s alive. Manticore killed a dude for letting himself get hypnotized into letting the vigilante escape, but Morpheus was fucked up by the time he got out. He might not have made it far.
All of Virgil’s visions show him dead, but that doesn’t mean anything. His visions show everyone dead. They’re a useless side effect of a useless power, anxiety flung forward to find the worst case scenarios and cling, and he knows better than to listen to them all the time by now.
Not that he should care what happened to some random vigilante, but he had to give Morpheus water one time, after a bad interrogation. Sue him for feeling a little concerned over a guy who watched him all cautious the whole time, even if that guy hid the fear with a smart mouth and jokes about Virgil’s height.
Morpheus had looked like shit. Virgil knew the feeling, that was all.
“So what am I supposed to do in here?” Virgil asks, because he’s not seeing anywhere really defensible. Julian pulls him over to one of the big cabinets in the back, where all the chemicals go, and Virgil says, knee-jerk, “ Fuck no.”
Something clicks around his wrist. He recognizes handcuffs and freezes, and Julian uses his metallokinesis to toss the other cuff in, melding it to the back of the cabinet and banging Virgil’s knees against the metal rim. “It only works when you’re scared, right?” Julian asks, with his friendly, shallow smile. Virgil can’t tell if he’s feeling any twinges of guilt. “We’ve gotta put you in the middle of the action.”
“What?” Virgil asks, uncomprehending, and his cousin turns and leaves the room. Understanding hits like being dunked in cold water. “Jules! Jules, they’ll kill me, I can see them killing me, please!”
Julian stops at the door and shrugs, tossing back a two-fingered salute. “Thanks for the save, Vee. If it helps, this wasn’t my idea.”
“Don’t leave me here!” Virgil shrieks, shadows flickering darker, and his cousin slams the door behind him, leaving Virgil alone under the fluorescent lights.
He can’t get all the way out of the cabinet. He tries to brace himself and move it, or dislodge the back of the cabinet from the rest, or break the handcuff chain, or anything, but that just leaves him panting and trembling, wrist chafed into bleeding. He could cut off his hand, comes the wild thought, staunch the flow before it killed him- but it wouldn’t work. His visions show a thousand iterations of Virgil bleeding out, or getting shot by Julian, or passing out and waking up to a stray fireball. A hundred thousand doomed timelines.
He tries to look ahead to see what happens if he stays and hides, and gets cooked alive, bashed to bits, suffocated by chemical gas-
Virgil chokes back a terrified sob, curling into the cabinet completely. Less possible deaths. That’s apparently the best he can hope for, the zenith of his dreams for the future. Maybe a less painful death, if the crossfire hits the cabinet quickly, or if Goldeye decides to eliminate all chances of an ambush before he and Panacea come in.
With the cabinet door shut, he’s squeezed into the small space with his head crushed into his knees, surrounded by darkness. It’s not all natural; as his fear rises, it pulses with it, pools in the corners of the room in surreptitious clusters. Virgil can feel them shuddering with his uneven breaths.
He closes his eyes against the fear and thinks, deliberately, four breaths in. Hold it for seven, just like his father used to tell him before he died. Out for eight, counting slow and calm until his chest is void of air.
The shadows fade. He talks himself through two more breathing exercises, stilling his shaking limbs, and rests his face in his knees, trying not to cry. He can’t even fucking turn around. They left him here and he can’t even shift in his hiding place, and any moment now the heroes are going to bust in and take all their righteous rage out on him.
He’ll deserve it, too. He never should have trusted Julian when he said he had a place to stay. He should have done more for Morpheus.
In the end, he’s not any better than Manticore. He’s just worse at his job.
Something explodes. Virgil jumps, hits his head on the cabinet ceiling, and winces back into his fetal position. The explosion isn’t close, but it sounds like Lilah losing her temper. For a moment he wonders if she’s actually mad they’re leaving him, and then two more blasts sound in quick succession, shaking the ground, and his heart leaps into his throat.
A crash. Someone shrieks- that’s Vince, with his glass-shredding voice- and cuts off, and then the lights in the lab cut off, red emergency bulbs blinking on in their place. Virgil sees the crimson light creep under the cabinet doors and nudges one open a tiny bit, enough to let him hide but still see out.
Stupid, but he never claimed to be smart. He just wants to see what’s coming.
The sounds of the fight continue, and then the door of the lab slams open, lock shattered like spun glass against Panacea’s over-energized strength. The hero has an abundance of what the press calls life energy, enough to give him more speed and power than a normal person and to let him heal on top of it; back when Virgil was naive enough to think he could be a hero, he used to idolize the guy.
Panacea always seemed so nice in front of the camera. Virgil wonders what he’ll be like now, terror ripping into him as he hears the hero move closer, and feels his ability surge back with a vengeance.
Panacea says into what’s probably a comm, “Yeah, I think so. There’s so much here, though, I’ve don’t recognize half of this stuff!” A pause. “I think I might see it?”
Virgil tenses, but the footsteps tap farther away. Any moment they’ll come closer, though, and his visions scream images of Panacea startling and punching straight through him, or smashing the cabinet without ever looking inside. He’s going to die handcuffed in a fucking box because he wasn’t useful enough as anything other than a diversion. He’s going to die , and he’ll never see Logan again, never get to let his best friend know where the hell he went after his dad died.
Somehow that’s the thought that pushes him over the edge, makes his eyes well up with fresh tears. He’s seen what Manticore does with captured heroes, what he did with Morpheus. He doesn’t want to know what these heroes will do to him in turn.
His breath comes short and shallow, quiet like hiding prey, begging the universe for this one break-- and the shadows in the room deepen with potential, reaching barely-gray tendrils to snare at Panacea’s ankles. Virgil feels the awareness drift over him like a cloud over the moon: Panacea’s keeping tight hold of his emotions, but there’s plenty of fear to work with.
Virgil screws up his courage and whispers, mind reaching, you can’t hear him. How do you know he’s still alive?
“Is it supposed to be radioactive? Maybe the labels should be more nu-clear to me, but I’m really getting lost with this filing system,” Panacea says, voice the tiniest bit higher. The clinks of his rummaging stop. “Jay? You’re cutting out.”
That’s because it’s not him , Virgil pushes. He’s dead and you’re here and you don’t know, he bled out while you were talking and you didn’t help, you were too slow and it’s your fault . He calibrates the fears as he goes, adjusting to make it so Panacea fails others, because playing on paranoia about himself doesn’t seem to be working.
Guilt rises like bile in his throat when Panacea’s breath audibly hitches, but he can’t stop. If he stops, Panacea will know something external was affecting him, and then he’ll kill Virgil for sure. He has to see this through.
“Jay?” Panacea pushes, and whatever the person on the end of the comm says doesn’t seem to compute. “I don’t-- I think I’m--”
You’re talking to no one. He’s dead, you let him die, he waited and begged you to save him and he’s dead and you did nothing .
“’S not true,” Panacea says, quieter, to himself. “Silly. You have a job to do.”
Your job was to protect him.
“He’s not. I know he’s not.”
The footsteps patter closer again, and Virgil screams, he is he is he’s dead it’s too late this was the last time, you knew this would happen--
Panacea chokes and stumbles, knees hitting the ground, and the shadows boil up around him, sinking in. He’s hugging himself. He’s crying in little gasps, so obviously panicked that it hurts Virgil to feel, mumbling under his breath. “No, no, no, it’s not, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to,” falling to pieces in front of him.
Too late, Virgil pushes, but it isn’t necessary. Panacea’s helpless, lost in guilt and fear, sobbing like he’s dying.
Virgil hates himself.
“Jay,” Panacea finally sobs, a high whimpering keen, and then there’s another presence in the room, an impermeable mind and a snarl of movement.
“Panacea?” Goldeye says, sounding almost panicked, and the other hero whines, curling into himself with his hands over his ears. Virgil freezes, wondering what Goldeye will do to him for being so useless.
“I’m sorry,” the other hero gasps, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry please I’m so sorry, it’s my fault, I wasn’t there-”
“It’s not true,” Goldeye snaps. “Whatever you think happened didn’t , Panacea, I’m right here.” He grabs Panacea’s shoulder, but there’s no reaction; the other hero is out of it, so far into grief and terror that he can’t see with open eyes.
Panacea sobs again, fingers clawing at his ears, and Goldeye stiffens. Virgil feels his shadows touch the hero’s skin and skid along the surface, unable to bridge the gap between minds; then Goldeye is staring right at the crack in the cabinet door, mismatched gaze filled with fury, and Virgil blanks with terror.
The room goes black, shadows filling every crevice, and Panacea screams . Virgil can feel his fear, sudden and overwhelming like falling through ice, so shocking it’s painful- and then Goldeye’s in front of him, lips curled in a snarl, and his painfully strong fingers wrap around Virgil’s arm to yank him out-
His handcuffed wrist breaks with an agonizing snap.
Virgil screams, kicking out and sinking teeth into Goldeye’s arm, twisting out of his grip; he hits the edge of the cabinet and scrambles as upright as he can, cuff pressing at his wrist just at the break. God , he can’t believe he’s gonna die like this, killed out of hand here or after the interrogation-
The shadows surge again, and Goldeye lashes out and grabs his chin. Virgil struggles, can’t fight his grip. Goldeye forces him to meet his eyes.
His powers cut off like an amputated limb, shadows disappearing like imaginary friends.
Virgil shakes, numb horror overtaking his limbs, and hopes Goldeye attributes his renewed crying to the broken wrist.
Panacea doubles over and throws up. Goldeye hisses, “Don’t move,” and goes over to him, leaving Virgil trapped in his own skin, barely able to curl in on himself or hide his face.
Goldeye murmurs to his partner for a moment, low enough that Virgil can’t concentrate to hear; he’s too busy staving off another panicked fit, trying to convince himself to die bravely. It hurts , worse than when he predicted from the wrong parameters and got two of Manticore’s men arrested, worse than when he tried to see Logan again and got locked in a cell without food until he learned to follow orders.
He’s never been without his powers. It feels like losing half his senses, reaching and finding a gap where his most important parts used to be. A sick, unimaginable loss.
Virgil imagines Goldeye keeping him like this all through interrogation, paring away part after part, and has to stifle a sob of his own. It’d be nothing more than he deserves, but the thought of drifting like that, not seeing the timelines where everything goes wrong, flying blind-
“What’s your name?” Goldeye snaps, and Virgil bites his tongue before the compulsion can make him answer. He doesn’t know what they’ll do with that information. It’s useless, just a fucking name, but Julian and everyone just call him Vee. No one since Logan has called him Virgil .
The thought of these heroes doing it, making him associate the sound of his full name with torture- “ Answer me,” the hero snarls, and Virgil snarls back, pushes with all he has not to keep quiet.
The pressure doesn’t let up. He finally forces out, “None of your business,” eyes stinging with the effort, and ducks his head.
“Goldeye,” Panacea says, and the other hero makes a sharp gesture, keeps glaring Virgil down. Panacea’s wavering, barely on his feet, pale and glassy-eyed; those are the aftereffects of Virgil’s power, the shaky lingering terror that makes you want to hide under the covers forever. It’s how he feels all the time.
“Fine,” Goldeye says, and the compulsion twists up through Virgil again, sharper and colder. “I won’t ask a better question. What are you doing here?”
“Diversion,” Virgil grits out, hating himself for it. His wrist is a bright spot of agony, bone peeking through the skin and raw with exposed nerves. He has to blink back more pointless tears, tensing when he closes his eyes in case Goldeye gets mad at the disrespect, and when he opens them the hero is staring at him again. “ What?”
“How old are you?” Goldeye demands, and behind him Panacea freezes, wet eyes fixing on them both.
Virgil blanks. “What month is it?” he asks, compulsion forcing him to at least try to answer.
“September,” Goldeye snaps. “It’s September fourth. How old are you?”
September fourth. Virgil missed his own birthday by over a month. “Fifteen,” he admits, wishing he could’ve at least exaggerated by a couple of years. “If-- if it’s September.” It might not be. Goldeye could be lying.
Goldeye swears, loud and vehement. Virgil cringes back, swallowing a cry at the pressure on his wrist, and the hero says, throwing up his hands, “Amazing. Perfect! Exactly what was needed at this moment, the absolute highlight of this beautiful day-”
“Jay,” Panacea says, sounding disapproving, and the other hero cuts off, throwing him a glare. Panacea glares back, almost chiding, and says, “Are you hurt, kiddo?”
“Don’t touch me,” Virgil snaps, and instinctively reaches for what happens if Panacea does, how much pain he has to expect. Coming up empty feels like stepping off a cliff into open air.
He sucks in a breath, distracted by the nothing where the rest of him should be, and Panacea says, softer, “I heard your wrist break. Do you want me to fix it?”
Foreign energy coursing through him, taking- more away, or mutating his cells, or healing him wrong to hurt him over and over again--
“No,” he snaps, but it comes out more like begging. “No, don’t- I don’t want, please don’t touch me-”
He can’t feel anything, not where it matters. No one’s coming to save him, and he’ll never see his best friend again, and once they realize he saw what happened to Morpheus they’ll do twice as bad to him. He’s at their mercy. He’s not important enough to deserve any.
The tears well up again, bringing fresh humiliation with them. Virgil risks wiping his eyes with his sleeve, refuses to meet Panacea’s eyes.
“I won’t,” the hero finally says, looking-- scared , or devastated, some emotion that doesn’t make sense. “But I’m gonna need to come closer to break the handcuffs. Is that okay with you?”
Virgil stares- why bother asking- and shuts his eyes, keeping as still as he can. Panacea approaches and reaches out an arm beside him, cuffs jerking faintly; the pressure flags all at once. Virgil pulls his wrist to his chest, and Panacea lets him keep it there.
“Is that better?” he asks, Goldeye standing sharp and calculating behind him. Virgil gives a defeated nod. It is better. It might not stay that way for long, but at the moment it’s nice to be able to keep his wrist where he can hold it. “Good! That’s good. Are you sure you don’t want me healing your wrist?”
The compulsion’s gone. Virgil still can’t feel the rest of himself. “I’m sure,” he rasps, waiting for it to happen anyway, but Panacea only stands.
“We’re gonna take you out of here,” he says, glancing back at Goldeye. The other hero nods, watching Virgil with bright, cunning eyes; Virgil shies from his gaze. “Can you walk, kiddo?”
“Yeah,” Virgil says, unfolding his aching legs. They almost buckle, unused to being straightened out after so long spent hiding, but he keeps himself standing. They don’t need to tie him up. He’s helpless, defanged by Goldeye’s venomous gaze, and he can barely walk as it is. Panacea could snap his neck with a twist of his fingers.
Panacea looks at him for a moment, then nods. “Your place or mine?”
Virgil blinks- he doesn’t have a place, what- and Goldeye says shortly, “Mine. We won’t need the facilities.”
Oh.
Virgil has to force himself not to sob out loud. Facilities , something Goldeye has that Panacea doesn’t- it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together. He can’t see his worst futures, doesn’t even have the security of dragging other people down with him when he’s too scared to think, and that’s not going to change, is it? Not while Goldeye is holding the keys. He’s completely and irrevocably fucked.
Virgil leans on Panacea when the hero offers, exhausted and sickly resigned, and wonders how often the hero’s going to have to heal him before he finally dies.
When Goldeye catches his eye again, he doesn’t bother trying to dodge.