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Laura stood in front of the door for a minute or two, lips pressed thin as she thought herself in circles. Finally she lifted her hand and knocked, then called to the person within, so that he could hear her voice and know which of the collection of rogues and scoundrels aboard this ship was disturbing him. “Daken?”
“... Come in, Laura,” the reply came muffled through the door.
Laura frowned, catching the handle of the door and sliding it open. “... You didn’t lock it,” she noted as the smell of blood invaded her senses. “You should lock it.”
“Might be fun to see who would try to cut my throat,” Daken replied with a shrug.
“Sabertooth would,” Laura said assuredly, stepping into the room, closing the door behind her and locking it. “You should lock it. You can’t afford to play games now.”
“You really think that lumbering ox could sneak up on me? I’m hurt,” Daken was hunched over the small table by his cot, the elbow of his left arm rested on its surface and his hand held above a towel, blood slowly dripping from his smallest finger into the towel and he grasped a watch in his right hand, glancing between its face and his left hand.
“How long have you been bleeding?” Laura asked quietly, slipping onto the chair that faced him and leaning across the table slightly to take a closer look at his finger. He had a small, very clean cut across the tip, obviously deliberate, for the purposes of this test.
“... Seven minutes,” Daken answered softly, not looking at her, shifting his eyes between the clock and his hand.
“It should have clotted,” Laura said, frowning and biting her lip.
“Yes, it should have,” Daken agreed dispassionately.
“... A human would have clotted by now,” Laura said, although she wasn’t really sure she was right; she didn’t know a great deal about the speed at which ordinary humans healed, but she had learned about torture during her training, and she was fairly certain such a small cut should have stopped bleeding by now.
“A hemophiliac wouldn’t,” Daken shrugged.
“It is not funny.”
“It’s ironic,” Daken replied, his tone flippant. “Irony is funny.”
“This is not,” Laura said firmly.
“Well, I’m not in withdrawal and I don’t feel like I’m headed into major organ failure. All told, so far this is quite a bit more pleasant than the last time my healing factor failed,” Daken reasoned.
“You need a doctor,” Laura said, staring at Daken’s finger. “One who could understand this. McCoy or Richards.”
“Yes. I’m sure that would go over well,” Daken smirked. “They could put me back on my feet, and then feel personally responsible for every murder and commissioned hit I make from now on. I think letting someone like me die might be a bit of a gray area for the Hippocratic Oath, Laura.”
“... You shouldn’t be here,” Laura’s voice dropped to something just above a whisper. “... You shouldn’t be going on this mission.”
“... I don’t trust Creed. Or Mystique,” Daken replied, his tone sobering. “I don’t trust any of them not to desecrate his remains. I trust you, but you are severely outnumbered, Laura.”
Laura said nothing, staring silently at Daken’s hand as she processed his statements. All of it had made sense and been predictable except for three words, ‘I trust you’. She had not expected that. The words and gestures Daken had directed at her the last few days had all been fairly consistent with that sentiment, but Laura did not quite understand how it had come to pass. There had been a rapport between them, in Madripoor, when they had fought back to back and parted on congenial terms. But trust? Her own trust could never have been earned so quickly, and she suspected that a great deal more people had earned her trust in the last year alone than had ever held Daken’s.
“Thirteen minutes,” Daken said, setting the watch down as Laura looked back at his hand and noted that the blood had finally stopped dripping. “How fortuitous.”
Daken dabbed his hand lightly against the towel and then ripped open an alcohol wipe to carefully clean his finger before covering the fissure with a stripe of superglue. Laura watched the procedure, at first wondering why Daken knew how to administer to an injury, and then wondering why she didn’t. She was on a team. She ought to know how to care for her teammates if they became injured. Had Daken ever performed field-medicine on someone else? The only teams Laura knew him to have been part of were this one and HAMMER’s Avengers.
“... You need a doctor,” Laura said again.
“I need to complete this retrieval, take back my freedom, and then reach down Shogun’s throat and rip out his slimy little spine,” Daken corrected.
“I don’t want you to die,” Laura looked up at him.
They stared at each other silently for a few seconds before Daken spoke again. “Laura, Logan was a brawler. He learned to fight like a tank. He always charged into the fray with a frontal assault, soaking hit after hit and trusting that he could survive anything. That isn’t what I learned,” he said quietly, maintaining unbroken eye contact as he spoke. “I learned to be invisible. I learned never to leave evidence behind. And that means never leaving blood.”
Laura let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. She pressed her lips together and looked away. It was true, Logan hadn’t been able to get the hang of fighting without a healing factor; Daken didn’t fight with the same berserker abandon as Logan. He never allowed himself to take an unnecessary hit, unless he was doing so to illustrate a point or frighten a layperson. He knew how to avoid personal injury. He didn’t use his healing factor as a crutch the way Logan had. “... You shouldn’t use your claws,” Laura noted.
“I know,” Daken nodded. “Even if I didn’t mind the bloody knuckles, it’s a marvelous way to get an infection.”
“Yes,” Laura agreed softly.
“I’m not helpless, Laura. And I won’t go down easily,” Daken said softly.
“... You need a weapon.”
“Creed would smell weakness,” Daken shook his head. “Then I really would need a weapon. I’m in far more danger from this ‘team’ than the mission. It’s basically a salvage. I should be able to bluff my way through it.”
Laura sighed, frowning unhappily but knowing that he had a point. “... Where are you going to go afterward?” she asked after a while.
“Not sure yet,” Daken shrugged. “There’s a few rocks I might turn over. Maybe I can find a doctor with less scruples than McCoy or Richards but more than Cornelius.”
Laura looked up at him sharply. “Your blood is valuable, Daken. Do not sell it. Do not allow anyone who would buy it to touch you.”
Daken studied her for a moment and then nodded. “You’re right, of course,” he agreed. “But then, if Shogun is to be believed, this Paradise organization already has samples of my genetics,” Daken drummed his fingers on the table, gazing off into the distance. “So maybe that’s what I should do after this. Track down and eradicate every last trace of them.”
Laura considered that. On the one hand, Daken was talking about committing an unknowable number of murders. On the other, he was talking about killing weapon smiths, torturers and child abusers... Laura pressed her lips together and swallowed tightly. When men like Cornelius were arrested, charged with crimes against humanity, sentenced to a lifetime of incarceration... they ended up being transferred to secret government laboratories to continue their work on a military payroll. Legal ‘justice’ didn’t work with men like that. Their evil was a useful evil which militaries and governments wanted.
“Once that’s done... I would imagine the Facility should be next on the list,” Daken murmured, and Laura knew he was watching her, she didn’t look up from where her eyes had settled on the table.
“... Does it ever end?” she whispered.
“Once every last scrap of Logan’s DNA, except for that which is in our bodies, is destroyed,” Daken answered.
Laura looked up at him now, tilting her head. “You’d be chasing the DNA? Not the men responsible for... weaponizing it?”
“There will always be evil men. Evil scientists and evil military leaders. No matter how many I killed, I couldn’t keep up with them,” Daken leaned his elbows on the table and rested his chin on woven fingers. “It’s more logical to focus on taking away their toys. I can kill the bastards when I see them, but that’s just catharsis. If I want to fix the problem, I need to take us away from them.”
Laura nodded slowly. “... That’s sensible,” she said. It wasn’t, in concept, unlike Doctor Kinney turning Laura loose on the Facility. She had seen the probability that the patchwork DNA she had synthesized to make Laura would be used again and again, without end, and that the research and the genetic material had to be destroyed to prevent an infinite number of child-weapons. She hadn’t just told Laura to kill Doctor Rice, which might have sufficed for revenge and set the project back several years, Doctor Kinney had told her to sterilize the Facility.
But going up against the Facility meant going up against Kimura and a private army, and Paradise was likely at least as well protected. While Daken’s solution was perhaps the most viable one in theory, the confidence he feigned in his ability to enact such measures was quixotic, especially when he’d been so badly handicapped. “You need to fix yourself first. You can’t undertake something like that when you’re vulnerable,” Laura said.
“... I might not be fixable, Laura,” Daken said in a softer voice. “Logan knew he was on his way out and he gave his life to take down Cornelius... He wasn’t wrong,” he looked away, swallowing. “If my healing factor can be repaired, then that will give me a better chance of answering their insult and finishing this game. If it can’t, then I want to do as much damage as possible before I run out of time.”
“... Someone else--”
“Laura, how many decades have the X-Men and the Avengers and whoever else been trying to cauterize this?” Daken cut her off, giving her a hard stare. “Heroes can’t do what it takes to end this, Laura. They have to follow rules. They have to show mercy... How many times do you think Arcade walked in and out of prison because the heroes couldn’t shoot him between the eyes?”
Laura clenched her jaw and her fists and glared at the table. “... You’re saying the prevention of murder is justification for murder?” she hissed through her teeth.
“I’m saying that if a dog bites, you put it down.”
“Like Logan put you down?” Laura looked up at him, biting her lip, searching his expression.
“Yes,” Daken replied without hesitation.
Laura felt cold and sick to her stomach. “... You’re not Arcade,” she whispered, then, in an even quieter voice, “... Do you kill children?”
“... I haven’t in a few decades,” Daken answered, not looking away. “... The first person I killed was ten years old. I was nine. A year later, I killed an infant.”
Laura stared at him for a long time in silence. “... Why?”
“The ten year old had tormented me as far back as I could remember. A classic schoolyard-bully type. I was getting even,” Daken replied easily, his eyes still locked on hers. “The infant was going to replace me. I was removing a threat.”
“... Replace you?”
“Japan has a strong stigma toward foundlings, and these eyes intensified that stigma quite a bit,” Daken said, tapping next to his right eye, indicating the blue which was nearly the only outward physical resemblance he held to Logan. “A legitimate heir is far preferable if one should become available. I’m not sure whether ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ miraculously stopped being barren, or if ‘Mother’ might have found another man to be her stud- I like to believe it was the latter- but she started needling my ‘Father’ to dispose of me as soon as she knew she was pregnant.”
Laura considered that carefully, turning the story over in her head several times. It was, in a way, self preservation. Even if the infant was helpless, its presence had still represented a threat. The question was less whether Daken had been threatened by it, and more how it was possible for a ten-year-old to be motivated to premeditated violence on such a scale. “... How old were you when your powers manifested?” Laura asked, looking back at him. Her own mutation had been forced early, and she didn’t know how old Logan had been when his started.
“I became aware of my claws when ‘Mother’ tried to shoot me,” Daken answered calmly. “I can’t remember when I stopped bruising, but my pheromones had been affecting people for some time. I wasn’t deliberately controlling it, but it had ‘Mother’ convinced I was a changeling.”
Then the predator instincts that accompanied their mutation had likely already kicked in before he began killing. Violence and bloodlust had become innate, visceral, and there had been no one to recognize or mitigate for the physiological changes or their psychological ramifications. “... Before the bully, did you hurt other people? Or animals?” Laura asked.
“Am I a psychopath?” Daken crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow. “Yes.”
“Who diagnosed you?” Laura asked, to which she received a moment of silence. “I am fairly certain you are not qualified to diagnose mental disorders, Daken,” she gave him an unimpressed stare. “I think you are using the label as an excuse.”
“Oh but you’re qualified to psychoanalyze me?” Daken snorted.
“I know cowardice when I see it,” Laura said, crossing her own arms. They glared at each other silently for a few minutes before Laura asked again, “Did you hurt any people or things before your powers started to manifest?”
“... I don’t remember doing so,” Daken said. “I could have forgotten.”
“... Psychopathy would be a very convenient thing to hide behind,” Laura said quietly. “No cure, no treatment, no one could expect better of you.”
“Psychoanalyzing.”
“Coward.”
There ensued another period of glaring. “Logan was wrong,” Laura said after a while, and could see a second or two of confusion in Daken’s eyes as he tried to retrace the path their conversation had taken in order to understand Laura’s statement. “You are not a lost cause. I regret that I did not make up with Logan before he died, but he was wrong.”
Daken frowned slightly, studying her. “... Make up with him?” he asked.
Laura looked down at the table again. “... I had not spoken to him in some time...”
“... Because of me?”
“... Because what he did to you was wrong,” Laura said, her voice quieter than before. “... Because I could never stop wondering, if I had been difficult, if I had not done as he asked me, if I had not gone to the school when he told me to and followed directions and done as I was instructed... if I had been frustrating or disappointing... would he have done the same to me?”
“No,” Daken said, without a trace of doubt in his voice.
Laura looked up at him, frowning softly. “Why are you so sure?”
“Because you’re a girl.”
Laura stared at him for a few minutes, trying to decide which was worse: the statement itself, Daken’s apparent earnestness, or the strong probability that it was true. She lowered her eyes again and drew a small sigh through her nose. “... Then that is another reason he was wrong. Gender should have nothing to do with it,” she said.
“It shouldn’t, but it always does,” Daken shrugged.
Laura hugged her arms a little closer around herself and glared at the table. Finally, in a voice just above a whisper, she said, “... I will not turn my back on you, Daken.”
Daken was quiet for a few minutes before responding. “I’m not going to change for you. I don’t care if you have ‘faith’ in me. I’m not going to change.”
“Everybody changes. Constantly,” Laura shook her head. “You will change, because that is part of being alive. But I do not expect you to become a ‘hero’. I do not expect you to become somebody else. I may not agree with the decisions you make, or how you choose to live, but I will not turn my back on you. You are my blood. You are my brother.”
After a few moments consideration, Daken said, “Then I suppose I should try not to die.”
“I would appreciate that.”