[Cable & Deadpool] Good Intentions (6/?)
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: 6/?
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool, X-Force, plus reference to past Cable/Domino
Rating: NC-17 (over all), PG (this part)
Word Count: 7135
Previous Parts: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
Man oh man but every time I actually update this story I end up apologising for it. This time, not only is this update ridiculously late, but the chapter I have just finished amounts to north of 7000 words of two peripheral characters working out their issues while the leads everyone is actually reading for hardly feature. That said, it did end up having a lot more to say about, for example, The Problems One Hits Trying To Make A Relationship Work With Cable (which is one of those things responsible for padding out that word count, and which may just be slightly significant in foreshadowing things to come) and it does have a scene with Deadpool, so my early plans to tag it as an interlude rather than a proper chapter have been scrapped. But with even that said, if anyone wants to just skim over this chapter and cut straight to the next one - which I swear to god is already mostly written and will be up soon - I will not hold it against you.
Cable had left the shapeshifter in the simulation room, guarded by security protocols locked to ignore commands issued from within, no matter whose voice or whose finger tips might enter them. Unfortunately, even from the outside the door wanted a passcode before it would open, and after five tries even Domino had to grind her teeth and admit that luck wasn't with her today. Time for a different strategy.
A hallway away she found the mercenary with the red and black costume loitering in the corridor. Given a choice he wouldn't have been her first-for all she knew he'd only been hired for this job and was only waiting around for someone to show up to hand over his pay so he could get out of here-but she didn't have the time to waste being picky, and if that meant he might suffer less from conflicts of loyalty than the kids might it was a chance worth taking
"Deadpool, right?" she called to him.
"In the spandex," said the mercenary. "What can I do you for?" On her first impression he'd struck her as the expressive type, but today there might as well have been a mannequin under that mask for all she could make of him; the way he stared at her made her wish, uncharacteristic as that impulse was, that she had Cable's talent for reading people.
"I need the code for the simulation room," said Domino, throwing out everything but the direct route.
"Why don'tcha ask Cable?"
"He's not up yet."
Deadpool gave her a long, silent look, and-mask or not-Domino's stubborn hope that he might not treat that excuse with all that skepticism it deserved spluttered out under the glare. It was either that or he knew enough about her history with Cable to be making assumptions about how she knew he wasn't up yet. She'd have preferred the latter.
"You got something to say to Nessa that can't wait until she's had her cornflakes?" asked Deadpool, after only slightly to long.
The nickname made her pause. "Nessa?"
Deadpool shrugged. "Me and Nessa had a thing back in the day. I'd break out the projector and tell you the whole sordid tale but that would mean I was letting you distract me from how you didn't answer my question."
If that little connection was coincidence Domino would eat her ammunition pouch, but her curiosity paled under the insinuation she'd been avoiding a question. "Your ex spent four months impersonating me while Tolliver had me down in that hole you pulled me out of yesterday. Yes, I have a few things to say to her."
"Uh-huh," said Deadpool. "'Things' like Cable had 'a few things to say' to Tolliver when he ran off yesterday?"
"Could be," said Domino, meeting his gaze as best the mask would let her.
"Oh, well, why didn't you say so then?" said Deadpool, pushing himself off the wall and turning back down the corridor. "Sheesh! C'mon!"
It was a reaction so unexpected that it took a couple of seconds before Domino realised he was leading her back to the hologram room.
"Then you don't have a problem with me doing this?" she asked, incredulous.
"With you beating the stuffing out of my ex while yours isn't there to referee? Look, sister, I don't know what ideas they gave you about my role in Cable's whole school-teacher-savior-gig, but I just work here."
Now it was Domino's turn to be skeptical. "And the fact she's your ex has nothing to do with that?"
"Not gonna lie, she's still hung up on me-what can I say, I'm a tough guy to get over-but Nessa's a big girl and she's gotta learn to clean up her own boo-boos."
At the door to the hologram room, Deadpool entered six digits into the passcode screen. The computer beeped at him angrily. The door stayed closed.
"I thought you had the code?" said Domino, impatient.
"Keep your tights on, I was watching when Cable coded it. The first digit was either a three or a four or a..."
The computer beeped, this time in a different tone, followed by the sound of a locking mechanism disengaging inside the door.
"...or a five, we have a winner!" said Deadpool.
"Great, I owe you one," said Domino, with as much sincerity as she could stomach, and stepped towards the door. The gratitude tarnished somewhat when Deadpool showed no signs of getting out of her way.
"Hold your horses, tiger," said Deadpool, holding her off with a hand placed square in the middle of her chest and leaning into her face, "you don't think you're stepping out on that there pitch without your pre-game pep talk from Coach 'Pool, do you? Square with me here, is this going to be the sort of game that ends with me cleaning up what's left of the other team with a mop? Because the paparazzi might eat that stuff up, but the local boy in blue sees a little differently, savvy?"
Domino looked down pointedly at the hand, which guiltily inched itself lower into safer territory. "Weren't you just telling me how much you didn't care what happened to your ex?" she asked.
"I don't, but there was this whole thing that happened to her while I was off dying of cancer this one time that involved some inbred throwback of an arms dealer blackmailing her into getting her hands in his dirty laundry. Next thing I know, bam, there we are, working the same gig-and by the holy ghost of Meg Ryan's wobbly bottom lip, was that a touching reunion fit for the romantic fucking comedy of the year. What I'm saying here is you might not tell to look at me but I have a few of my own issues with Nessa to figure out, and the nice man in the white coat with the collection of decorative scalpels is real big on me working through them in what he likes to call constructive stages. Would be nice to know there's gonna be enough of her left for that when you're done."
"Get out of my way, Deadpool," said Domino, rapidly approaching the end of her patience.
"I can watch, right?"
"Go away."
"Fine, this is me, walking away," said Deadpool, gesticulating at her behind him even as he did, "but you better understand that you got ten minutes tops before I'm back with popcorn."
Domino hit the button to lock the door behind her, glad to see the last of him and doing her best to put that offhand comment about blackmail that had tumbled out of his mouth with the rest of the drivel out of her mind.
With the door shut the only light in the simulation room filtered dimly through the observation windows, high above. "Lights," Domino instructed, remembering a little late that even that command might not be active with the current security settings turned up to 'paranoia', but the room saved her the embarrassment by lighting up on cue.
Since the holographic technology that powered it could just as easily make a proper bed as rough pallet or a thin mattress, Copycat had been given the former to sleep on, no matter that it stuck out like something from an Alice in Wonderland-inspired hallucination against the stark metal that covered everything else. She stirred with the lights and sat up, watching Domino approach with the bleary look of the not yet properly awake. If she'd suffered any lost sleep for her sins it didn't show.
"Where's Cable?" she asked.
"Sleeping in," said Domino, posture squared and gaze locked a pointed several inches beyond her head.
Copycat froze in the act of rubbing sleep from her face and stared, eyes widening as the implications sunk in.
Good. Domino wanted her to know what was about to happen. No more delays, no second guessing her judgement, they were having this out here and now.
"I don't think we've been properly introduced, what with how I was barely conscious when they brought me to meet you-that's right, barely conscious and I do remember it," she added, when Vanessa looked startled by that information. "But you already seem to know more about me than what I like to share, and your boss made the time to go to great lengths about what you do for a living while he had me locked up in that rat-infested hole, so we're going to skip the pleasantries." Domino took a breath. "This imitation of me that's so good even Cable couldn't tell the difference-I want to see it."
Copycat muttered something, looking away.
"You have something to say?"
"I said, it's not that easy," Copycat pleaded, barely louder.
"Not that easy?" Domino echoed. "You had everyone here convinced you were me for the last four months straight, and now it's too hard?"
"Maybe you didn't catch the part where it took me all evening to remember how to stop," Copycat. snapped, teeth clicking in the manner of a cornered animal baring its fangs. "Pull up a chair," she suggested, hunching back in on herself, "I'll tell you all about how much I wish I'd been one of the ones who got those powers you can switch on and off as you please, but the 'gift' I got is so temperamental that I'm just waiting for the day when a sneeze turns me blue in public. I let my mind wander looking at the cute guy across the isle on the bus, and I am that cute guy, do you understand what I'm saying? Being you that long was like... like clenching a muscle until it seized. Do I have to spell out how it felt to release it after so long?"
Domino took a long look at her, her eyes shying away from contact, fingers clutching at the edge of the mattress, the very picture of the pitiful, battered waif, and felt rage rising like bile in her throat.
"Don't you dare screw with me, not here and not today, I am not in the mood and you can save the sob stories for someone who cares. That was not a request. I don't give a damn whether you're going to enjoy it."
"Neither did Tolliver," Copycat spat right back. Low blow, but it would have hit harder if it hadn't been on just the level Domino wanted to see. "You're not the only one he screwed over," she threw out, defensive, "I didn't volunteer for this job, he forced me into it; I didn't get any more choice about how I spent the last four months than you did."
That, on the other hand, was everything she should have known better than to imply; the space between them was gone before Domino knew she was doing it, the need to grab her bodily and shake some sense into her thrumming through her fingers.
"Really? Sounds to me like maybe he had the right idea," she said, holding herself back by inches. "You see, I'm not hearing that you can't do what I'm telling you, I'm hearing that you won't. So morphing is like flexing a muscle to you-well, in my experience, muscle memory is never that easy to unlearn, and I don't think pulling off a morph you had that long to get used to is nearly as hard as you want me to believe. So what's really holding you back?"
"Do you think I liked being you?" There was a desperate, high-pitched note in Copycat's voice and she was shaking visibly; any points she might have gained for what was left of her determination to hold her ground more than undone by how far she was already leaning back.
"So this is something you don't want to do," said Domino, victorious.
"I..."
"How much is it going to take to bring it all rushing back?" Domino didn't wait for an answer before balling up a fist and throwing it into Copycat's face.
The blow caught her under the chin and sent her rolling heels-over-head backward over the bed. At the last second, she found purchase on the mattress with one hand and turned the motion into a neat roll that landed her squarely on her toes on the far side.
In all that motion, Domino missed the exact moment that the transformation took place. After, staring across the room into her own face, the first thought to cross her mind was that Copycat couldn't be all that good; there was no way that was what she looked like when she was furious.
"There. Was that so hard?"
"You stupid bitch," Copycat screeched, leaping the bed and coming at Domino fist first, "do you have any idea what you've made me do?"
Domino leaned out of the way, and turned to keep Copycat in her sight. "Face how much of those issues with your little shapeshifting trick were all in your head? You're welcome." Copycat was fast enough to keep her moving, but from the way she was throwing herself mindlessly around this was going to be over before it started. However, before Domino could make up her mind whether that was call to revel in her obvious superiority or bemoan the loss of the chance to work out her frustrations at the length they deserved, she watched Copycat weave straight under her returning blow like a pro and throw a sharp jab that very nearly caught her in the gut.
"Is that supposed to make this easier?" Copycat shrieked, leaving an opening Domino was momentarily too surprised to react to. "A little trashy self-help rhetoric and I haven't just undone the hours my body took remembering who I am? Fuck you Domino, you did me enough damage last time I dug you out of my head."
"Leaving things half done never was my style." Domino jumped to avoid a low kick meant to knock her feet from under her. "Nice move," she said, feinted a hook just close enough to put Copycat off her centre, then dropped and swung a leg to catch her in the ankles, "But I do it better."
Domino was on her the moment she hit the floor, yanking her into a headlock with a knee jammed into the middle of her back. After a few seconds of ineffective struggling it seemed to dawn on Copycat that she wasn't making any progress against Domino's grip and nor was Domino letting her go, and she went limp
"Happy now?" Copycat spat, half-choking on the second word. "You wanted to prove who's the better Domino, congratulations. Now get off!"
Domino tightened her grip. "You don't get out of this that easily. Cable would have found you out inside a week if that was your best."
Copycat's fingers clawed ineffectually at her arms (Domino always had had that habit of keeping her fingernails short). "I suppose it never occurred to you to thank me. Tolliver wanted that bomb set before a week was out. If I hadn't stalled so long..."
"I'll get that for you on a card, shall I-'Thanks for not blowing my team sky-high'? You knew where I was, you could have told Cable any time, but you left me there."
"Tolliver was blackmailing me, you headcase. I couldn't raise a hand against him."
"Oh do go on," Domino growled in her ear, "let's hear all about how my life was worth less than your reputation."
Leaning in that close was a beginner's mistake; Copycat headbutted her in the nose and rolled them both over. In the ensuing tangle of limbs Domino caught an elbow under the ribs and, half-winded, lost what was left of her grip.
Copycat beat her back to her feet, and had the gall to stand there and watch, flexing her fingers, as Domino got her balance back. "I couldn't expect you to understand-how by the time I'd known him long enough to trust him," the punch came a split-second before Domino was ready-deflecting it was easy, keeping her balance steady enough to retaliate in its wake, much harder, "it was already too late!"
Having to watch those words coming from her mouth made Domino's lip curl. "Too late?" She was at a ridiculous angle to kick Copycat in the face but that didn't stop her trying, "What's a fourth month in that hole when I'd already lasted three, is that what you thought?" The kick sailed harmlessly over Copycat's shoulder. That guiding sense that was Domino's mutant birthright was screaming at her now, but she was too mad to listen. She hurled herself back at her opponent with her fists flying.
Copycat stood her ground. "Oh, it's all-" Domino's first punch left her with her arm trapped across her body, Copycat's fingers like a vice around her wrist, "about-" the second should have got her in the jaw before she could press that advantage- instead it met the same fate, "you, isn't it?" This last Copycat delivered leaning so close into Domino's face that she flinched away. When she tried to twist out of the lock Copycat let her, kept her hold on Domino's left arm and used her own momentum to twist it behind her back. "But that's got to be easier than believing the pawn Tolliver sent to take your place wasn't such a complete wretch she was grateful for the honour of being you."
"Give me a break, a morpher who finds it easier to take someone else's face than to show her own? Freud would have had a field day." Copycat had sounded so close, but when Domino jerked her head back in mimicry of Copycat's trick she hit nothing but air. "You should count yourself lucky, most people who hate themselves that much don't have another option to fall back on." Talking should have been a way to keep her enemy distracted while she locked a foot behind Copycat's ankle but the ankle wasn't there, her own feet wouldn't move fast enough-everything below her hip was beginning to feel like one long cramp. She couldn't be out of breath this fast, she was better than this!
"And that's supposed to make it better?" said Copycat, holding her there far, far too easily. "What would Freud have to say about a merc lady who went to this much trouble to bash in someone else wearing her face?"
Something hit Domino in the back of the knee and by the time she registered that nothing was holding her up anymore she was too close to the floor to do much about it. She caught herself on her hands an inch above the ground and rolled back to her feet, wrists screaming.
"He'd call it therapy." The words came out as a gasp.
"Therapy," scoffed Copycat. "You want therapy, when do we get to the part where we talk about what kind of person pins all her issues on the easy target just because her boyfriend let the big bad walk away?"
Domino let out a roar and tackled her, straight to the midsection. Catching her by surprise, she wrapped her hands around Copycat's belt and hurled her at the bed. The bed frame was metal and very solid; the throw should have slammed her right into the corner, but Copycat pulled off a million to one mid-air twist in the middle of the motion, missed the end with every limb by less than inches and rolled clean over the mattress again to come up on her feet on the far side. Domino was following long before she landed only to see Copycat swing into a full roundhouse kick without even so much as a glance back at what she was aiming for. The million years a move that wide gave you to get out of the way meant nothing when you'd hurled yourself into mid air with every expectation nothing like that could be coming. The kick hit Domino square across the face and hurled her into the bed end so hard the whole frame sea-sawed off the floor, joints shrieking.
"Come on, Domino," said Copycat.... somewhere, "who are you really mad at? Is it..." There was something about Tolliver, rubbing her face in her own helplessness, but the words went straight by; they didn't matter, the only thing that mattered was figuring out where they were coming from, all the while not thinking about how much luck it would take to land that kick blind.
"Is it Cable, for never realising I wasn't the real thing?" That damned voice again-there she was, standing tall and comfortable, practically posing by the edge of the bed, like a mirror image that didn't know how to fucking behave. Domino launched herself at her with all the momentum she could throw into one blow, but at the moment she should have connected, somehow Copycat wasn't there. She stuttered to a stop with the rest of the world lagging tantalisingly far behind her; when Copycat came back, she came out of nowhere.
"Or is it yourself, for never letting him get to know you well enough to tell the difference?" she spat, so close to Domino's face that she actually gasped. She didn't see the blow coming.
"This macho bullshit-all this 'who's the better Domino'-you picked the wrong girl to try this on," Copycat went on as Domino gasped for breath and cursed her for not having the decency to punch her in the ear and spare her having to listen to all this crap. "I know you, Dom. That voice at the back of your mind telling you how much you're going to regret this when you've calmed down? Well I've heard it. Want to hear how long it's been there? Want me to tell you all about the day you realised it had started to sound like Cable? How hard it made it to take the bad money jobs and go on looking yourself in the eye in the mirror in the morning? Should I tell you just how much it had to do with how you could never blame him for what he did to Hammer and Kane the way you knew you should have? There's no-one you ever shared that one with, is there Dom-but I know."
Running on pure rage and little else, Domino scraped herself back to her feet one more time. "What the fuck would you know? Four months in a mask and you know me?" Something damp was trickling down the side of her face; she didn't check what colour it left on the back of her sleeve after she wiped it away.
"Better. I was you. All your looks and all your luck and all your dirty secrets. Say whatever you please about Tolliver, he likes his people to be good at what they do, and I promise you there is no-one better than me. There's nothing cosmetic about my imitations." She spread her hands. "Come on, Domino, you're never going to get another chance like this again-you want to punch yourself in the face that badly, let me have it."
It would have been nice to say a calmer Domino could have called that bluff, but she'd never been good with mind games. It didn't matter if this gave that fake exactly what she'd asked for, it didn't matter if there was no physical way to throw so many months' of having your impostor's success waved under your nose into one blow. Lips and fingers curling back in tandem, Domino felt every last tendon in her arm straining before she let it go, and watched Copycat's head snap under the blow with the slap-crunch of too little flesh separating bone from bone.
For a long moment Domino actually wondered if she'd broken the impostor's neck.
In the next, Copycat looked back at her, horrifyingly lucid, spat once, snapped her head back so neatly she might have been playing the punch in reverse and glared at Domino with her teeth bared and fire in her eyes. A small trickle of blood made its way down her chin from her lip. She didn't wipe it away.
"That's it?!" she roared, and of all insults she had the nerve to sound betrayed by Domino's weakness-by her inability to make a dent in a copy carved from raw sinew. "That's the best you've got?"
The kick that slammed straight through Domino's guard and into her side could have easily got her in the gut instead, and only didn't because Copycat hadn't double space meant it to. Another solid blow there now would have put her down for a good long while, and it sank into Domino's awareness like a knife that the only reason she was still on her feet was because Copycat wanted her running.
"The great Domino, mercenary extraordinaire a snap of her fingers and all the cards fall her way," in Copycat-Domino's voice the words almost sang, they hit with as much force as the punches Copycat hurled her way, almost like an afterthought, "can't topple a two-bit fraud without a single move she didn't steal from someone else? This is the real Domino?"
Domino picked herself up and ran, as best she could with every muscle in her body busily remembering it had been four months since she'd done this last, and stupid rage only gave you a pass to forget that for so long. What she managed was closer to a stagger, and worse for knowing every passing blow she dodged missed only with Copycat's permission.
"Would the real Domino have let scum like Tolliver tag her off the street? Would the real Domino have let him lock her in a cave for four months like a cartoon princess, waiting for her boyfriend to come rescue her?"
Those words in her voice-it didn't even sound like she ought to, not to anyone who'd never heard what Domino heard in the privacy of her own head. But here she was still running, until a calculated kick that sank deep into the muscle of what passed for her good leg took it out from under her. Domino caught herself on one wrist, lost any chance of pushing herself back up when Copycat swept what was left of her support out from under her. She landed hard on an elbow and from there it was all she could do to get her arms up to shield her face from the ground.
Copycat towered over her, tall and twisted in fury, and if she wasn't attacking it could only be because her point had been made. "You tell me, Neena," she growled, "which one of us sounds more like the real Domino to you?"
Domino dropped her guard, mostly out of shock. "Mother of fuck, you really do think you're me!"
Maybe luck really was still with her, that must have been exactly the right thing to say. The other Domino froze.
In all the long, surreal experience that was fighting a perfect copy of herself that day, there was nothing that would stay with Domino as long as the sight of her own face twisting into an expression that did not belong on it at all, in the moments before Copycat came suddenly and utterly apart. "No..." she whispered.
Domino stared as Copycat raised her hands inch by twitching inch towards her face. Surely, after all this, it couldn't be that easy?
"No!" Copycat shrieked, louder now, the full magnitude of the last few minutes sinking in deep. "No, no, I'm not doing this again, I'm not you. I'm not you. I'm not you." She staggered backwards two paces before her legs gave out and she sank to the floor in a quivering heap. "I'm-I'm... I'm..."
After a few moments of this, Domino reached for the last of her reserves, firmly told a number of muscles exactly what they could do with their protests, and levered herself, albeit haltingly, back to her feet. She limped a couple of paces towards what was left of Copycat, down for the count in every way that mattered, but as a spectacle it got old quickly. Because really, where the fuck was the satisfaction in having it proven that your replacement was every inch the basket case you'd gone out to show yourself she was?
"Vanessa," she offered.
Copycat looked up at her, wild-eyed and helpless.
"Your... ex called you Nessa," clarified Domino. "Vanessa. Right?"
She watched her own lips silently mouth the name.
The reverse transformation was slower; Domino's skin shrinking away in patches as the blue returned from underneath, spreading until she finally had the face to (in Domino's not exactly charitable estimation) suit that hang-dog expression she was pulling.
"That didn't seem so hard this time." said Domino.
Vanessa buried her face in her hands. "Oh fuck off, already! You've made your goddamned point."
"Yeah," allowed Domino, barely grudgingly. "And you made yours pretty loudly too. But I think we still have a few things to talk about before we're done here, no?"
Vanessa gave one terse nod.
***
One on one, with no energy left to second-guess herself, Domino couldn't have said she liked 'Vanessa' much, or that she would have thought much better of her had they met under very different circumstances. Not even several years of Cable's influence had managed to add more than a very little extra depth to the shallow well of patience available to Domino for dealing with nature's born victims, and none of the evidence of anything Vanessa had done to fight that status did much to temper gut reaction.
"I don't believe you thought you could beat me," Vanessa grumbled. "Four months on starvation rations at the bottom of a hole-you haven't even seen the sun since before New Year's-have you looked in the mirror lately? You don't look like you have the muscle left to bench-press a broom."
"Let's say this morning hasn't been my proudest moment and leave it there, okay?" Domino returned. "You want a rematch after I've a couple of weeks back in the weight room, you just say the word."
"Count me out."
"Good thing you came out on top of this one," this admission came out through a corner of Domino's mouth, "or I'd have to really wonder how you ever made Cable buy that you were me."
Vanessa poked gingerly at a muscle on her upper arm that was starting to blacken and wrinkled her nose. Seated on the floor with her back to the edge of the mattress as far away from one another as the length of the bed would allow, the job of damage assessment was keeping Domino similarly occupied between exchanges (bruises, for the most part, but enough of them that she'd be remembering this a while). The arrangement also thankfully spared them the necessity of making eye contact any more often than they could stomach.
"For the record," said Vanessa, "I hated being you."
"You had me fooled."
"Well yes, Dom, fooling people is what I do," said Vanessa, but without any real malice. "Keeping track of that little corner of myself that's still me at the back of my mind-that's the hard part. The truth is," she admitted, fingers twitching feverishly over a safer patch of skin under the bruise, "you didn't have it so far wrong. Yes, I got lost in the role; it was the only way I could deal with what I was doing. I never forgot I was working for Tolliver, but I was you working for Tolliver, because... because, hell, I didn't even know why. I was Domino who was a traitor to her own friends, trying to play both sides without giving myself away. Spilling the truth to Cable wasn't much of an option when even I couldn't keep track of it."
"So this is a thing with you?" Domino asked, still getting her head around some of that. "The mutant shape shifter who copies so well even she can't tell the difference?"
"Look, I'm not great at compartmentalising my entire psyche. I don't usually have to keep it up that long with a telepath watching my every move."
Domino stretched an arm over her shoulder and winced, happy to pass it off as muscle-pain.
"If we're sharing, you were right about me and Cable too. We're not... I don't know what we are half the time. I'm not going to paint us as soulmates or any of that dime-store novel crap, but as you seem to have picked up, there aren't many people who ever got as far under my skin as Nate did. If he couldn't tell the real me from a fake... well, there probably isn't anyone who could. I may not have reacted so well to having that thrown in my face."
Vanessa scoffed out one high note of laughter, but Domino didn't feel she had much license to object until Vanessa followed it up with, "How about 'convenient'? Because that's what it was, right? One big, fat relationship of convenience between two mercs who made a great team but who could never work up the guts to talk to each other about whether they wanted to be more than that."
"Word of advice from one social throwback to another," Domino cut in before she could dig that hole any deeper, "that thing you just did? Don't do that. Ever."
"Sorry," said Vanessa, weakly, "force of habit. But if you look under the low blow, you might have spotted that the first version of Domino he ever rejected has her own excuses for being bitter. Which is to say I didn't sleep with him. In case you were wondering."
Domino hadn't been, but it would be a stupid to pretend the question wasn't there, waiting to raise its ugly head from amongst the rest of the leftover baggage she still had as souvenirs of the last few months. Dimly, she had the idea she should have reacted more strongly, been relieved, or perhaps morally insulted. Both, maybe, once she'd had some real sleep. She almost asked Vanessa why in hell she thought that would be the sticking point; instead, it came out as, "Well, I suppose if anything would have given you away..."
"What?" said Vanessa, startled. "Jesus, you don't get it, do you? For all Tolliver cared, using that advantage was my job description. I don't think you get how my powers work, Dom. I don't just imitate people, when I copy someone, it goes down to the cellular level. Powers, thought patterns, some of their memories, habits-when I morph there's nothing left to give me away."
Domino breathed out. "Damn." That was Vanessa's way of saying Cable wouldn't have been the first, wasn't it? Well hell if she was going to ask now.
"Besides, he turned me down," said Vanessa, oddly bitter. "There was some excuse about how it wasn't the right time for it-like that was ever the sticking point in what you had together."
"You took that personally," Domino guessed.
"Forget personal, I thought it meant he knew!"
"This even with all that big talk about your thought pattern trick?"
"Oh bite me. I told you I'd never had to fool a telepath before."
The conversation hit a lull there as they both sat and processed for a bit.
"How'd he turn you down?" Domino asked.
Vanessa gave her a startled look.
"What?" said Domino. "I may as well know what he's been saying to me behind my back."
Vanessa laughed at little and shook her head, clearly directed at parties not present. "That that wasn't why he'd asked me to come back," she said, not gently. "So of course I said, good, that's-"
"-not what I came back for," finished Domino, over her. She shook her head. "Ha. Of course you did."
"That was where he made his weak excuse about timing," Vanessa went on. "I don't even remember how he worded it-it was that bad."
"Then I would have asked if he was breaking it off with me," Domino supplied.
"He asked if we had anything to break off,"
"And you said 'you tell me, Nate'."
"And then he said goodnight and left me in the hallway," Vanessa finished.
"Seriously?"
"Hand to God."
"That idiot." It wasn't funny, really, except for the part where this was how she heard about it. It was Nate all through.
"I probably would have planted the bomb that night if I hadn't been so busy freaking out," said Vanessa, though it came out in an off-hand way that made it hard to tell whether that was a confession or a joke.
"Oh Christ." That wasn't funny either and she definitely wasn't laughing. "A little soon for that, don't you think?"
"You know the stupid part?" said Vanessa-this time it was definitely a confession. "He was still one of the better parts of being you. Bastard."
Well if that wasn't a statement loaded with subtext. "You didn't fall for him, did you?"
"For Cable? No," said Vanessa, too fast to have thought about her answer, which may have been why a moment later it had turned into, "I don't know. Give me a month or two to figure out whose feelings were whose and I'll get back to you."
"That doesn't sound like a 'no'."
"Let me finish," said Vanessa. "When I got stuck with this job, I walked in thinking the fastest way out would be to get it over with. That didn't last long, not after I'd been you a few days and realised Tolliver wanted a bunch of kids going down in the collateral, but Cable... well, you know what he's like."
"Even knowing you've been in my head," said Domino, "there are so many things you could be talking about."
"Try this: you know that thing he does where he tosses himself headfirst into whatever's going down, and he drags you and everyone else around along for the ride? He doesn't tell you why. He doesn't tell you what the plan is. You don't even know there is a plan until the moment comes when you realise it all hinged on you doing exactly whatever you just did, and you realise none of it would have worked if he hadn't trusted you to do it." Around this point her willingness to make eye contact wavered, right on schedule. "Call me crazy for enjoying any part of that, but I'm not used to being trusted. Not the way he trusts you."
That thing, thought Domino. And even though it frustrated the living fuck out of you, you'd come so far that you couldn't help hanging on to find out what the real plan was-his big picture deal, whatever it was all the little things were adding up towards. That thing he was always dropping just enough hints about to keep you guessing. At least until it turned out 'that thing' was worth watching two of your teammates burn for. "You have an interesting way of defining 'trust'."
"I realise," said Vanessa. "Even so. You know it's true."
That was hard to argue when she'd stuck by him anyway, and not solely on account of a conscience that had taken to singing everything to the tune of do as I say, not as I do. Most people who knew Cable threw in the towel around when they realised that no matter what the stakes were, he was never bluffing. If it took a sacrifice or two to reach his endgame, c'est la vie. Where Domino had failed was that she'd stuck around a little past that and realised that as often or not, that was the bluff. No matter how well he played the omnipotent mastermind, even he wasn't infallible. Even Cable needed someone around to watch his back.
Because now was such a perfect time to go pulling those stitches.
"What's Tolliver got on you?" Domino asked, because someone needed to change the subject. "Someone mentioned 'blackmail'."
"I took a job for him a year ago when I was hard up for cash," Vanessa replied, "it was a chicken-feed job, nothing I hadn't done before. Borrow someone's face, walk in, walk out with a file under my arm. What I didn't know then was that he got it on tape."
"Minus any details that could lead the fuzz back to him?" Domino guessed.
"Exactly," said Vanessa. She hesitated a bit before adding, "No lecture on how I should have known better than to get in bed with his type?"
"From me? How do you think Cable got on Tolliver's blacklist? You take one bad job from the wrong guy, and next thing you know he has a grudge that's aging like good brandy." Though if that was really all there was to Tolliver's issues with Cable, Domino was going to have to find some more equipment worth eating. "I'm a merc, Vanessa. A merc with luck powers. I know when not to jinx myself."
That actually got her a smile. Not that Domino was looking or anything. She levered herself to her feet, conscious of Vanessa still watching.
"So... is that it? Are we good?" Vanessa asked, fingers twitching again, face surprisingly open.
"Good?" echoed Domino, through teeth that suddenly did not seem to want to unclench. "I don't think that's likely, do you? You've got your issues, fine, but don't think for one second that excuses half of what you helped put me and this team through. You want to make amends, that's on your neck. But you may have noticed I suck at this talking about my feelings shit, so I'll just say that if I have to deal with knowing how easily I could be replaced, it... helps, knowing it took the best to pull it off. That it's one thing I don't have to blame Nate for."
Two steps closer the door she stopped again on a whim. "Oh, and Vanessa? Thanks. For not blowing my team sky high."
"Any time," said Vanessa. "Though if I'd been being fair I should have told you to thank Deadpool for ratting me out first-all I did was stall. Not that you'd have much to thank him for if Cable hadn't hired him," if she'd had a point at the start here, it was rapidly devolving into thinking aloud, "and even that sounds like it was just some crazy whim, so I wouldn't thank him either. You might as well call it-
"Luck?" said Domino, actually feeling a little lighter for the first since roughly forever. "That I can live with."
She got to the door without looking back again after that and locked it on the way out, but she very nearly thought better of it.
Plot notes
In the aftermath to Vanessa's big reveal as an impostor in the comics, she and Domino were briefly forced to work together to track a missing Cable down, but Vanessa snuck off before any of those lingering issues between them could be given any real closure. While they did eventually get around to settling their differences in canon, it took them until Cable #37-39 to do it, and to put the scale of that delay in perspective, their last meeting in X-Force was over long before Cable's solo series had been greenlighted for issue #1. The canonical version goes into a lot less in detail than this one does and, as such things generally do, shared a lot of its page time with a subplot about microscopic mutant-hating baddies messing with everyone's emotions. Not that that was necessarily a bad thing - after the matter had languishing unresolved for so long and both of them had had so much time to come to terms with what they'd gone through individually, making a bigger deal out of the issue would probably have been overkill. This is the main relevant page from the last issue of that arc (after they'd gotten through the inevitable punching-each-other-in-the-face stage of the therapeutic process).
From my own point of view, there's enough hinted at between the lines in the comics about what they both went through that I always felt there could have been more done with their eventual confrontation. Or more to the point, they're going to have to deal with each other a fair bit more in the GI-verse in the near future than the comics ever made them, and emotions are still new and raw, so the showdown had to have been a much messier deal. My original plan was to skip over this scene entirely and summarise it in the start of the next chapter, but then I started speculating about exactly how it would have gone and wanted to try writing it out, and the end result got away from me a bit. I have an odd fondness for Vanessa and found myself quite enjoying writing for Domino once I'd gotten into it.
As a bit of related trivia, while the stuff about Vanessa's shapeshifting letting her copy everything down to the thought patterns of her target comes straight from the pages of canon, rarely will you see a clearer example of the knots the writers ended up tying themselves in to retcon Cable's psi powers over his earlier appearances. By Cable #39, the fact Vanessa was able to fool a telepath needed some serious explaining. Back in X-Force, no-one even knew he was supposed to be telepathic, and the 'first' time he uses those powers in any significant capacity on page in Cable #19 comes as a surprise to everyone including his own son.
You run into a lot of that sort of thing when you start trying to make sense of back issues.
Chapter 7
Summary: Deadpool thought killing that 'Nathan' guy was going to be a fairly routine job. He couldn't have been more wrong.
Chapter: 6/?
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool, X-Force, plus reference to past Cable/Domino
Rating: NC-17 (over all), PG (this part)
Word Count: 7135
Previous Parts: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
Man oh man but every time I actually update this story I end up apologising for it. This time, not only is this update ridiculously late, but the chapter I have just finished amounts to north of 7000 words of two peripheral characters working out their issues while the leads everyone is actually reading for hardly feature. That said, it did end up having a lot more to say about, for example, The Problems One Hits Trying To Make A Relationship Work With Cable (which is one of those things responsible for padding out that word count, and which may just be slightly significant in foreshadowing things to come) and it does have a scene with Deadpool, so my early plans to tag it as an interlude rather than a proper chapter have been scrapped. But with even that said, if anyone wants to just skim over this chapter and cut straight to the next one - which I swear to god is already mostly written and will be up soon - I will not hold it against you.
Cable had left the shapeshifter in the simulation room, guarded by security protocols locked to ignore commands issued from within, no matter whose voice or whose finger tips might enter them. Unfortunately, even from the outside the door wanted a passcode before it would open, and after five tries even Domino had to grind her teeth and admit that luck wasn't with her today. Time for a different strategy.
A hallway away she found the mercenary with the red and black costume loitering in the corridor. Given a choice he wouldn't have been her first-for all she knew he'd only been hired for this job and was only waiting around for someone to show up to hand over his pay so he could get out of here-but she didn't have the time to waste being picky, and if that meant he might suffer less from conflicts of loyalty than the kids might it was a chance worth taking
"Deadpool, right?" she called to him.
"In the spandex," said the mercenary. "What can I do you for?" On her first impression he'd struck her as the expressive type, but today there might as well have been a mannequin under that mask for all she could make of him; the way he stared at her made her wish, uncharacteristic as that impulse was, that she had Cable's talent for reading people.
"I need the code for the simulation room," said Domino, throwing out everything but the direct route.
"Why don'tcha ask Cable?"
"He's not up yet."
Deadpool gave her a long, silent look, and-mask or not-Domino's stubborn hope that he might not treat that excuse with all that skepticism it deserved spluttered out under the glare. It was either that or he knew enough about her history with Cable to be making assumptions about how she knew he wasn't up yet. She'd have preferred the latter.
"You got something to say to Nessa that can't wait until she's had her cornflakes?" asked Deadpool, after only slightly to long.
The nickname made her pause. "Nessa?"
Deadpool shrugged. "Me and Nessa had a thing back in the day. I'd break out the projector and tell you the whole sordid tale but that would mean I was letting you distract me from how you didn't answer my question."
If that little connection was coincidence Domino would eat her ammunition pouch, but her curiosity paled under the insinuation she'd been avoiding a question. "Your ex spent four months impersonating me while Tolliver had me down in that hole you pulled me out of yesterday. Yes, I have a few things to say to her."
"Uh-huh," said Deadpool. "'Things' like Cable had 'a few things to say' to Tolliver when he ran off yesterday?"
"Could be," said Domino, meeting his gaze as best the mask would let her.
"Oh, well, why didn't you say so then?" said Deadpool, pushing himself off the wall and turning back down the corridor. "Sheesh! C'mon!"
It was a reaction so unexpected that it took a couple of seconds before Domino realised he was leading her back to the hologram room.
"Then you don't have a problem with me doing this?" she asked, incredulous.
"With you beating the stuffing out of my ex while yours isn't there to referee? Look, sister, I don't know what ideas they gave you about my role in Cable's whole school-teacher-savior-gig, but I just work here."
Now it was Domino's turn to be skeptical. "And the fact she's your ex has nothing to do with that?"
"Not gonna lie, she's still hung up on me-what can I say, I'm a tough guy to get over-but Nessa's a big girl and she's gotta learn to clean up her own boo-boos."
At the door to the hologram room, Deadpool entered six digits into the passcode screen. The computer beeped at him angrily. The door stayed closed.
"I thought you had the code?" said Domino, impatient.
"Keep your tights on, I was watching when Cable coded it. The first digit was either a three or a four or a..."
The computer beeped, this time in a different tone, followed by the sound of a locking mechanism disengaging inside the door.
"...or a five, we have a winner!" said Deadpool.
"Great, I owe you one," said Domino, with as much sincerity as she could stomach, and stepped towards the door. The gratitude tarnished somewhat when Deadpool showed no signs of getting out of her way.
"Hold your horses, tiger," said Deadpool, holding her off with a hand placed square in the middle of her chest and leaning into her face, "you don't think you're stepping out on that there pitch without your pre-game pep talk from Coach 'Pool, do you? Square with me here, is this going to be the sort of game that ends with me cleaning up what's left of the other team with a mop? Because the paparazzi might eat that stuff up, but the local boy in blue sees a little differently, savvy?"
Domino looked down pointedly at the hand, which guiltily inched itself lower into safer territory. "Weren't you just telling me how much you didn't care what happened to your ex?" she asked.
"I don't, but there was this whole thing that happened to her while I was off dying of cancer this one time that involved some inbred throwback of an arms dealer blackmailing her into getting her hands in his dirty laundry. Next thing I know, bam, there we are, working the same gig-and by the holy ghost of Meg Ryan's wobbly bottom lip, was that a touching reunion fit for the romantic fucking comedy of the year. What I'm saying here is you might not tell to look at me but I have a few of my own issues with Nessa to figure out, and the nice man in the white coat with the collection of decorative scalpels is real big on me working through them in what he likes to call constructive stages. Would be nice to know there's gonna be enough of her left for that when you're done."
"Get out of my way, Deadpool," said Domino, rapidly approaching the end of her patience.
"I can watch, right?"
"Go away."
"Fine, this is me, walking away," said Deadpool, gesticulating at her behind him even as he did, "but you better understand that you got ten minutes tops before I'm back with popcorn."
Domino hit the button to lock the door behind her, glad to see the last of him and doing her best to put that offhand comment about blackmail that had tumbled out of his mouth with the rest of the drivel out of her mind.
With the door shut the only light in the simulation room filtered dimly through the observation windows, high above. "Lights," Domino instructed, remembering a little late that even that command might not be active with the current security settings turned up to 'paranoia', but the room saved her the embarrassment by lighting up on cue.
Since the holographic technology that powered it could just as easily make a proper bed as rough pallet or a thin mattress, Copycat had been given the former to sleep on, no matter that it stuck out like something from an Alice in Wonderland-inspired hallucination against the stark metal that covered everything else. She stirred with the lights and sat up, watching Domino approach with the bleary look of the not yet properly awake. If she'd suffered any lost sleep for her sins it didn't show.
"Where's Cable?" she asked.
"Sleeping in," said Domino, posture squared and gaze locked a pointed several inches beyond her head.
Copycat froze in the act of rubbing sleep from her face and stared, eyes widening as the implications sunk in.
Good. Domino wanted her to know what was about to happen. No more delays, no second guessing her judgement, they were having this out here and now.
"I don't think we've been properly introduced, what with how I was barely conscious when they brought me to meet you-that's right, barely conscious and I do remember it," she added, when Vanessa looked startled by that information. "But you already seem to know more about me than what I like to share, and your boss made the time to go to great lengths about what you do for a living while he had me locked up in that rat-infested hole, so we're going to skip the pleasantries." Domino took a breath. "This imitation of me that's so good even Cable couldn't tell the difference-I want to see it."
Copycat muttered something, looking away.
"You have something to say?"
"I said, it's not that easy," Copycat pleaded, barely louder.
"Not that easy?" Domino echoed. "You had everyone here convinced you were me for the last four months straight, and now it's too hard?"
"Maybe you didn't catch the part where it took me all evening to remember how to stop," Copycat. snapped, teeth clicking in the manner of a cornered animal baring its fangs. "Pull up a chair," she suggested, hunching back in on herself, "I'll tell you all about how much I wish I'd been one of the ones who got those powers you can switch on and off as you please, but the 'gift' I got is so temperamental that I'm just waiting for the day when a sneeze turns me blue in public. I let my mind wander looking at the cute guy across the isle on the bus, and I am that cute guy, do you understand what I'm saying? Being you that long was like... like clenching a muscle until it seized. Do I have to spell out how it felt to release it after so long?"
Domino took a long look at her, her eyes shying away from contact, fingers clutching at the edge of the mattress, the very picture of the pitiful, battered waif, and felt rage rising like bile in her throat.
"Don't you dare screw with me, not here and not today, I am not in the mood and you can save the sob stories for someone who cares. That was not a request. I don't give a damn whether you're going to enjoy it."
"Neither did Tolliver," Copycat spat right back. Low blow, but it would have hit harder if it hadn't been on just the level Domino wanted to see. "You're not the only one he screwed over," she threw out, defensive, "I didn't volunteer for this job, he forced me into it; I didn't get any more choice about how I spent the last four months than you did."
That, on the other hand, was everything she should have known better than to imply; the space between them was gone before Domino knew she was doing it, the need to grab her bodily and shake some sense into her thrumming through her fingers.
"Really? Sounds to me like maybe he had the right idea," she said, holding herself back by inches. "You see, I'm not hearing that you can't do what I'm telling you, I'm hearing that you won't. So morphing is like flexing a muscle to you-well, in my experience, muscle memory is never that easy to unlearn, and I don't think pulling off a morph you had that long to get used to is nearly as hard as you want me to believe. So what's really holding you back?"
"Do you think I liked being you?" There was a desperate, high-pitched note in Copycat's voice and she was shaking visibly; any points she might have gained for what was left of her determination to hold her ground more than undone by how far she was already leaning back.
"So this is something you don't want to do," said Domino, victorious.
"I..."
"How much is it going to take to bring it all rushing back?" Domino didn't wait for an answer before balling up a fist and throwing it into Copycat's face.
The blow caught her under the chin and sent her rolling heels-over-head backward over the bed. At the last second, she found purchase on the mattress with one hand and turned the motion into a neat roll that landed her squarely on her toes on the far side.
In all that motion, Domino missed the exact moment that the transformation took place. After, staring across the room into her own face, the first thought to cross her mind was that Copycat couldn't be all that good; there was no way that was what she looked like when she was furious.
"There. Was that so hard?"
"You stupid bitch," Copycat screeched, leaping the bed and coming at Domino fist first, "do you have any idea what you've made me do?"
Domino leaned out of the way, and turned to keep Copycat in her sight. "Face how much of those issues with your little shapeshifting trick were all in your head? You're welcome." Copycat was fast enough to keep her moving, but from the way she was throwing herself mindlessly around this was going to be over before it started. However, before Domino could make up her mind whether that was call to revel in her obvious superiority or bemoan the loss of the chance to work out her frustrations at the length they deserved, she watched Copycat weave straight under her returning blow like a pro and throw a sharp jab that very nearly caught her in the gut.
"Is that supposed to make this easier?" Copycat shrieked, leaving an opening Domino was momentarily too surprised to react to. "A little trashy self-help rhetoric and I haven't just undone the hours my body took remembering who I am? Fuck you Domino, you did me enough damage last time I dug you out of my head."
"Leaving things half done never was my style." Domino jumped to avoid a low kick meant to knock her feet from under her. "Nice move," she said, feinted a hook just close enough to put Copycat off her centre, then dropped and swung a leg to catch her in the ankles, "But I do it better."
Domino was on her the moment she hit the floor, yanking her into a headlock with a knee jammed into the middle of her back. After a few seconds of ineffective struggling it seemed to dawn on Copycat that she wasn't making any progress against Domino's grip and nor was Domino letting her go, and she went limp
"Happy now?" Copycat spat, half-choking on the second word. "You wanted to prove who's the better Domino, congratulations. Now get off!"
Domino tightened her grip. "You don't get out of this that easily. Cable would have found you out inside a week if that was your best."
Copycat's fingers clawed ineffectually at her arms (Domino always had had that habit of keeping her fingernails short). "I suppose it never occurred to you to thank me. Tolliver wanted that bomb set before a week was out. If I hadn't stalled so long..."
"I'll get that for you on a card, shall I-'Thanks for not blowing my team sky-high'? You knew where I was, you could have told Cable any time, but you left me there."
"Tolliver was blackmailing me, you headcase. I couldn't raise a hand against him."
"Oh do go on," Domino growled in her ear, "let's hear all about how my life was worth less than your reputation."
Leaning in that close was a beginner's mistake; Copycat headbutted her in the nose and rolled them both over. In the ensuing tangle of limbs Domino caught an elbow under the ribs and, half-winded, lost what was left of her grip.
Copycat beat her back to her feet, and had the gall to stand there and watch, flexing her fingers, as Domino got her balance back. "I couldn't expect you to understand-how by the time I'd known him long enough to trust him," the punch came a split-second before Domino was ready-deflecting it was easy, keeping her balance steady enough to retaliate in its wake, much harder, "it was already too late!"
Having to watch those words coming from her mouth made Domino's lip curl. "Too late?" She was at a ridiculous angle to kick Copycat in the face but that didn't stop her trying, "What's a fourth month in that hole when I'd already lasted three, is that what you thought?" The kick sailed harmlessly over Copycat's shoulder. That guiding sense that was Domino's mutant birthright was screaming at her now, but she was too mad to listen. She hurled herself back at her opponent with her fists flying.
Copycat stood her ground. "Oh, it's all-" Domino's first punch left her with her arm trapped across her body, Copycat's fingers like a vice around her wrist, "about-" the second should have got her in the jaw before she could press that advantage- instead it met the same fate, "you, isn't it?" This last Copycat delivered leaning so close into Domino's face that she flinched away. When she tried to twist out of the lock Copycat let her, kept her hold on Domino's left arm and used her own momentum to twist it behind her back. "But that's got to be easier than believing the pawn Tolliver sent to take your place wasn't such a complete wretch she was grateful for the honour of being you."
"Give me a break, a morpher who finds it easier to take someone else's face than to show her own? Freud would have had a field day." Copycat had sounded so close, but when Domino jerked her head back in mimicry of Copycat's trick she hit nothing but air. "You should count yourself lucky, most people who hate themselves that much don't have another option to fall back on." Talking should have been a way to keep her enemy distracted while she locked a foot behind Copycat's ankle but the ankle wasn't there, her own feet wouldn't move fast enough-everything below her hip was beginning to feel like one long cramp. She couldn't be out of breath this fast, she was better than this!
"And that's supposed to make it better?" said Copycat, holding her there far, far too easily. "What would Freud have to say about a merc lady who went to this much trouble to bash in someone else wearing her face?"
Something hit Domino in the back of the knee and by the time she registered that nothing was holding her up anymore she was too close to the floor to do much about it. She caught herself on her hands an inch above the ground and rolled back to her feet, wrists screaming.
"He'd call it therapy." The words came out as a gasp.
"Therapy," scoffed Copycat. "You want therapy, when do we get to the part where we talk about what kind of person pins all her issues on the easy target just because her boyfriend let the big bad walk away?"
Domino let out a roar and tackled her, straight to the midsection. Catching her by surprise, she wrapped her hands around Copycat's belt and hurled her at the bed. The bed frame was metal and very solid; the throw should have slammed her right into the corner, but Copycat pulled off a million to one mid-air twist in the middle of the motion, missed the end with every limb by less than inches and rolled clean over the mattress again to come up on her feet on the far side. Domino was following long before she landed only to see Copycat swing into a full roundhouse kick without even so much as a glance back at what she was aiming for. The million years a move that wide gave you to get out of the way meant nothing when you'd hurled yourself into mid air with every expectation nothing like that could be coming. The kick hit Domino square across the face and hurled her into the bed end so hard the whole frame sea-sawed off the floor, joints shrieking.
"Come on, Domino," said Copycat.... somewhere, "who are you really mad at? Is it..." There was something about Tolliver, rubbing her face in her own helplessness, but the words went straight by; they didn't matter, the only thing that mattered was figuring out where they were coming from, all the while not thinking about how much luck it would take to land that kick blind.
"Is it Cable, for never realising I wasn't the real thing?" That damned voice again-there she was, standing tall and comfortable, practically posing by the edge of the bed, like a mirror image that didn't know how to fucking behave. Domino launched herself at her with all the momentum she could throw into one blow, but at the moment she should have connected, somehow Copycat wasn't there. She stuttered to a stop with the rest of the world lagging tantalisingly far behind her; when Copycat came back, she came out of nowhere.
"Or is it yourself, for never letting him get to know you well enough to tell the difference?" she spat, so close to Domino's face that she actually gasped. She didn't see the blow coming.
"This macho bullshit-all this 'who's the better Domino'-you picked the wrong girl to try this on," Copycat went on as Domino gasped for breath and cursed her for not having the decency to punch her in the ear and spare her having to listen to all this crap. "I know you, Dom. That voice at the back of your mind telling you how much you're going to regret this when you've calmed down? Well I've heard it. Want to hear how long it's been there? Want me to tell you all about the day you realised it had started to sound like Cable? How hard it made it to take the bad money jobs and go on looking yourself in the eye in the mirror in the morning? Should I tell you just how much it had to do with how you could never blame him for what he did to Hammer and Kane the way you knew you should have? There's no-one you ever shared that one with, is there Dom-but I know."
Running on pure rage and little else, Domino scraped herself back to her feet one more time. "What the fuck would you know? Four months in a mask and you know me?" Something damp was trickling down the side of her face; she didn't check what colour it left on the back of her sleeve after she wiped it away.
"Better. I was you. All your looks and all your luck and all your dirty secrets. Say whatever you please about Tolliver, he likes his people to be good at what they do, and I promise you there is no-one better than me. There's nothing cosmetic about my imitations." She spread her hands. "Come on, Domino, you're never going to get another chance like this again-you want to punch yourself in the face that badly, let me have it."
It would have been nice to say a calmer Domino could have called that bluff, but she'd never been good with mind games. It didn't matter if this gave that fake exactly what she'd asked for, it didn't matter if there was no physical way to throw so many months' of having your impostor's success waved under your nose into one blow. Lips and fingers curling back in tandem, Domino felt every last tendon in her arm straining before she let it go, and watched Copycat's head snap under the blow with the slap-crunch of too little flesh separating bone from bone.
For a long moment Domino actually wondered if she'd broken the impostor's neck.
In the next, Copycat looked back at her, horrifyingly lucid, spat once, snapped her head back so neatly she might have been playing the punch in reverse and glared at Domino with her teeth bared and fire in her eyes. A small trickle of blood made its way down her chin from her lip. She didn't wipe it away.
"That's it?!" she roared, and of all insults she had the nerve to sound betrayed by Domino's weakness-by her inability to make a dent in a copy carved from raw sinew. "That's the best you've got?"
The kick that slammed straight through Domino's guard and into her side could have easily got her in the gut instead, and only didn't because Copycat hadn't double space meant it to. Another solid blow there now would have put her down for a good long while, and it sank into Domino's awareness like a knife that the only reason she was still on her feet was because Copycat wanted her running.
"The great Domino, mercenary extraordinaire a snap of her fingers and all the cards fall her way," in Copycat-Domino's voice the words almost sang, they hit with as much force as the punches Copycat hurled her way, almost like an afterthought, "can't topple a two-bit fraud without a single move she didn't steal from someone else? This is the real Domino?"
Domino picked herself up and ran, as best she could with every muscle in her body busily remembering it had been four months since she'd done this last, and stupid rage only gave you a pass to forget that for so long. What she managed was closer to a stagger, and worse for knowing every passing blow she dodged missed only with Copycat's permission.
"Would the real Domino have let scum like Tolliver tag her off the street? Would the real Domino have let him lock her in a cave for four months like a cartoon princess, waiting for her boyfriend to come rescue her?"
Those words in her voice-it didn't even sound like she ought to, not to anyone who'd never heard what Domino heard in the privacy of her own head. But here she was still running, until a calculated kick that sank deep into the muscle of what passed for her good leg took it out from under her. Domino caught herself on one wrist, lost any chance of pushing herself back up when Copycat swept what was left of her support out from under her. She landed hard on an elbow and from there it was all she could do to get her arms up to shield her face from the ground.
Copycat towered over her, tall and twisted in fury, and if she wasn't attacking it could only be because her point had been made. "You tell me, Neena," she growled, "which one of us sounds more like the real Domino to you?"
Domino dropped her guard, mostly out of shock. "Mother of fuck, you really do think you're me!"
Maybe luck really was still with her, that must have been exactly the right thing to say. The other Domino froze.
In all the long, surreal experience that was fighting a perfect copy of herself that day, there was nothing that would stay with Domino as long as the sight of her own face twisting into an expression that did not belong on it at all, in the moments before Copycat came suddenly and utterly apart. "No..." she whispered.
Domino stared as Copycat raised her hands inch by twitching inch towards her face. Surely, after all this, it couldn't be that easy?
"No!" Copycat shrieked, louder now, the full magnitude of the last few minutes sinking in deep. "No, no, I'm not doing this again, I'm not you. I'm not you. I'm not you." She staggered backwards two paces before her legs gave out and she sank to the floor in a quivering heap. "I'm-I'm... I'm..."
After a few moments of this, Domino reached for the last of her reserves, firmly told a number of muscles exactly what they could do with their protests, and levered herself, albeit haltingly, back to her feet. She limped a couple of paces towards what was left of Copycat, down for the count in every way that mattered, but as a spectacle it got old quickly. Because really, where the fuck was the satisfaction in having it proven that your replacement was every inch the basket case you'd gone out to show yourself she was?
"Vanessa," she offered.
Copycat looked up at her, wild-eyed and helpless.
"Your... ex called you Nessa," clarified Domino. "Vanessa. Right?"
She watched her own lips silently mouth the name.
The reverse transformation was slower; Domino's skin shrinking away in patches as the blue returned from underneath, spreading until she finally had the face to (in Domino's not exactly charitable estimation) suit that hang-dog expression she was pulling.
"That didn't seem so hard this time." said Domino.
Vanessa buried her face in her hands. "Oh fuck off, already! You've made your goddamned point."
"Yeah," allowed Domino, barely grudgingly. "And you made yours pretty loudly too. But I think we still have a few things to talk about before we're done here, no?"
Vanessa gave one terse nod.
***
One on one, with no energy left to second-guess herself, Domino couldn't have said she liked 'Vanessa' much, or that she would have thought much better of her had they met under very different circumstances. Not even several years of Cable's influence had managed to add more than a very little extra depth to the shallow well of patience available to Domino for dealing with nature's born victims, and none of the evidence of anything Vanessa had done to fight that status did much to temper gut reaction.
"I don't believe you thought you could beat me," Vanessa grumbled. "Four months on starvation rations at the bottom of a hole-you haven't even seen the sun since before New Year's-have you looked in the mirror lately? You don't look like you have the muscle left to bench-press a broom."
"Let's say this morning hasn't been my proudest moment and leave it there, okay?" Domino returned. "You want a rematch after I've a couple of weeks back in the weight room, you just say the word."
"Count me out."
"Good thing you came out on top of this one," this admission came out through a corner of Domino's mouth, "or I'd have to really wonder how you ever made Cable buy that you were me."
Vanessa poked gingerly at a muscle on her upper arm that was starting to blacken and wrinkled her nose. Seated on the floor with her back to the edge of the mattress as far away from one another as the length of the bed would allow, the job of damage assessment was keeping Domino similarly occupied between exchanges (bruises, for the most part, but enough of them that she'd be remembering this a while). The arrangement also thankfully spared them the necessity of making eye contact any more often than they could stomach.
"For the record," said Vanessa, "I hated being you."
"You had me fooled."
"Well yes, Dom, fooling people is what I do," said Vanessa, but without any real malice. "Keeping track of that little corner of myself that's still me at the back of my mind-that's the hard part. The truth is," she admitted, fingers twitching feverishly over a safer patch of skin under the bruise, "you didn't have it so far wrong. Yes, I got lost in the role; it was the only way I could deal with what I was doing. I never forgot I was working for Tolliver, but I was you working for Tolliver, because... because, hell, I didn't even know why. I was Domino who was a traitor to her own friends, trying to play both sides without giving myself away. Spilling the truth to Cable wasn't much of an option when even I couldn't keep track of it."
"So this is a thing with you?" Domino asked, still getting her head around some of that. "The mutant shape shifter who copies so well even she can't tell the difference?"
"Look, I'm not great at compartmentalising my entire psyche. I don't usually have to keep it up that long with a telepath watching my every move."
Domino stretched an arm over her shoulder and winced, happy to pass it off as muscle-pain.
"If we're sharing, you were right about me and Cable too. We're not... I don't know what we are half the time. I'm not going to paint us as soulmates or any of that dime-store novel crap, but as you seem to have picked up, there aren't many people who ever got as far under my skin as Nate did. If he couldn't tell the real me from a fake... well, there probably isn't anyone who could. I may not have reacted so well to having that thrown in my face."
Vanessa scoffed out one high note of laughter, but Domino didn't feel she had much license to object until Vanessa followed it up with, "How about 'convenient'? Because that's what it was, right? One big, fat relationship of convenience between two mercs who made a great team but who could never work up the guts to talk to each other about whether they wanted to be more than that."
"Word of advice from one social throwback to another," Domino cut in before she could dig that hole any deeper, "that thing you just did? Don't do that. Ever."
"Sorry," said Vanessa, weakly, "force of habit. But if you look under the low blow, you might have spotted that the first version of Domino he ever rejected has her own excuses for being bitter. Which is to say I didn't sleep with him. In case you were wondering."
Domino hadn't been, but it would be a stupid to pretend the question wasn't there, waiting to raise its ugly head from amongst the rest of the leftover baggage she still had as souvenirs of the last few months. Dimly, she had the idea she should have reacted more strongly, been relieved, or perhaps morally insulted. Both, maybe, once she'd had some real sleep. She almost asked Vanessa why in hell she thought that would be the sticking point; instead, it came out as, "Well, I suppose if anything would have given you away..."
"What?" said Vanessa, startled. "Jesus, you don't get it, do you? For all Tolliver cared, using that advantage was my job description. I don't think you get how my powers work, Dom. I don't just imitate people, when I copy someone, it goes down to the cellular level. Powers, thought patterns, some of their memories, habits-when I morph there's nothing left to give me away."
Domino breathed out. "Damn." That was Vanessa's way of saying Cable wouldn't have been the first, wasn't it? Well hell if she was going to ask now.
"Besides, he turned me down," said Vanessa, oddly bitter. "There was some excuse about how it wasn't the right time for it-like that was ever the sticking point in what you had together."
"You took that personally," Domino guessed.
"Forget personal, I thought it meant he knew!"
"This even with all that big talk about your thought pattern trick?"
"Oh bite me. I told you I'd never had to fool a telepath before."
The conversation hit a lull there as they both sat and processed for a bit.
"How'd he turn you down?" Domino asked.
Vanessa gave her a startled look.
"What?" said Domino. "I may as well know what he's been saying to me behind my back."
Vanessa laughed at little and shook her head, clearly directed at parties not present. "That that wasn't why he'd asked me to come back," she said, not gently. "So of course I said, good, that's-"
"-not what I came back for," finished Domino, over her. She shook her head. "Ha. Of course you did."
"That was where he made his weak excuse about timing," Vanessa went on. "I don't even remember how he worded it-it was that bad."
"Then I would have asked if he was breaking it off with me," Domino supplied.
"He asked if we had anything to break off,"
"And you said 'you tell me, Nate'."
"And then he said goodnight and left me in the hallway," Vanessa finished.
"Seriously?"
"Hand to God."
"That idiot." It wasn't funny, really, except for the part where this was how she heard about it. It was Nate all through.
"I probably would have planted the bomb that night if I hadn't been so busy freaking out," said Vanessa, though it came out in an off-hand way that made it hard to tell whether that was a confession or a joke.
"Oh Christ." That wasn't funny either and she definitely wasn't laughing. "A little soon for that, don't you think?"
"You know the stupid part?" said Vanessa-this time it was definitely a confession. "He was still one of the better parts of being you. Bastard."
Well if that wasn't a statement loaded with subtext. "You didn't fall for him, did you?"
"For Cable? No," said Vanessa, too fast to have thought about her answer, which may have been why a moment later it had turned into, "I don't know. Give me a month or two to figure out whose feelings were whose and I'll get back to you."
"That doesn't sound like a 'no'."
"Let me finish," said Vanessa. "When I got stuck with this job, I walked in thinking the fastest way out would be to get it over with. That didn't last long, not after I'd been you a few days and realised Tolliver wanted a bunch of kids going down in the collateral, but Cable... well, you know what he's like."
"Even knowing you've been in my head," said Domino, "there are so many things you could be talking about."
"Try this: you know that thing he does where he tosses himself headfirst into whatever's going down, and he drags you and everyone else around along for the ride? He doesn't tell you why. He doesn't tell you what the plan is. You don't even know there is a plan until the moment comes when you realise it all hinged on you doing exactly whatever you just did, and you realise none of it would have worked if he hadn't trusted you to do it." Around this point her willingness to make eye contact wavered, right on schedule. "Call me crazy for enjoying any part of that, but I'm not used to being trusted. Not the way he trusts you."
That thing, thought Domino. And even though it frustrated the living fuck out of you, you'd come so far that you couldn't help hanging on to find out what the real plan was-his big picture deal, whatever it was all the little things were adding up towards. That thing he was always dropping just enough hints about to keep you guessing. At least until it turned out 'that thing' was worth watching two of your teammates burn for. "You have an interesting way of defining 'trust'."
"I realise," said Vanessa. "Even so. You know it's true."
That was hard to argue when she'd stuck by him anyway, and not solely on account of a conscience that had taken to singing everything to the tune of do as I say, not as I do. Most people who knew Cable threw in the towel around when they realised that no matter what the stakes were, he was never bluffing. If it took a sacrifice or two to reach his endgame, c'est la vie. Where Domino had failed was that she'd stuck around a little past that and realised that as often or not, that was the bluff. No matter how well he played the omnipotent mastermind, even he wasn't infallible. Even Cable needed someone around to watch his back.
Because now was such a perfect time to go pulling those stitches.
"What's Tolliver got on you?" Domino asked, because someone needed to change the subject. "Someone mentioned 'blackmail'."
"I took a job for him a year ago when I was hard up for cash," Vanessa replied, "it was a chicken-feed job, nothing I hadn't done before. Borrow someone's face, walk in, walk out with a file under my arm. What I didn't know then was that he got it on tape."
"Minus any details that could lead the fuzz back to him?" Domino guessed.
"Exactly," said Vanessa. She hesitated a bit before adding, "No lecture on how I should have known better than to get in bed with his type?"
"From me? How do you think Cable got on Tolliver's blacklist? You take one bad job from the wrong guy, and next thing you know he has a grudge that's aging like good brandy." Though if that was really all there was to Tolliver's issues with Cable, Domino was going to have to find some more equipment worth eating. "I'm a merc, Vanessa. A merc with luck powers. I know when not to jinx myself."
That actually got her a smile. Not that Domino was looking or anything. She levered herself to her feet, conscious of Vanessa still watching.
"So... is that it? Are we good?" Vanessa asked, fingers twitching again, face surprisingly open.
"Good?" echoed Domino, through teeth that suddenly did not seem to want to unclench. "I don't think that's likely, do you? You've got your issues, fine, but don't think for one second that excuses half of what you helped put me and this team through. You want to make amends, that's on your neck. But you may have noticed I suck at this talking about my feelings shit, so I'll just say that if I have to deal with knowing how easily I could be replaced, it... helps, knowing it took the best to pull it off. That it's one thing I don't have to blame Nate for."
Two steps closer the door she stopped again on a whim. "Oh, and Vanessa? Thanks. For not blowing my team sky high."
"Any time," said Vanessa. "Though if I'd been being fair I should have told you to thank Deadpool for ratting me out first-all I did was stall. Not that you'd have much to thank him for if Cable hadn't hired him," if she'd had a point at the start here, it was rapidly devolving into thinking aloud, "and even that sounds like it was just some crazy whim, so I wouldn't thank him either. You might as well call it-
"Luck?" said Domino, actually feeling a little lighter for the first since roughly forever. "That I can live with."
She got to the door without looking back again after that and locked it on the way out, but she very nearly thought better of it.
Plot notes
In the aftermath to Vanessa's big reveal as an impostor in the comics, she and Domino were briefly forced to work together to track a missing Cable down, but Vanessa snuck off before any of those lingering issues between them could be given any real closure. While they did eventually get around to settling their differences in canon, it took them until Cable #37-39 to do it, and to put the scale of that delay in perspective, their last meeting in X-Force was over long before Cable's solo series had been greenlighted for issue #1. The canonical version goes into a lot less in detail than this one does and, as such things generally do, shared a lot of its page time with a subplot about microscopic mutant-hating baddies messing with everyone's emotions. Not that that was necessarily a bad thing - after the matter had languishing unresolved for so long and both of them had had so much time to come to terms with what they'd gone through individually, making a bigger deal out of the issue would probably have been overkill. This is the main relevant page from the last issue of that arc (after they'd gotten through the inevitable punching-each-other-in-the-face stage of the therapeutic process).
From my own point of view, there's enough hinted at between the lines in the comics about what they both went through that I always felt there could have been more done with their eventual confrontation. Or more to the point, they're going to have to deal with each other a fair bit more in the GI-verse in the near future than the comics ever made them, and emotions are still new and raw, so the showdown had to have been a much messier deal. My original plan was to skip over this scene entirely and summarise it in the start of the next chapter, but then I started speculating about exactly how it would have gone and wanted to try writing it out, and the end result got away from me a bit. I have an odd fondness for Vanessa and found myself quite enjoying writing for Domino once I'd gotten into it.
As a bit of related trivia, while the stuff about Vanessa's shapeshifting letting her copy everything down to the thought patterns of her target comes straight from the pages of canon, rarely will you see a clearer example of the knots the writers ended up tying themselves in to retcon Cable's psi powers over his earlier appearances. By Cable #39, the fact Vanessa was able to fool a telepath needed some serious explaining. Back in X-Force, no-one even knew he was supposed to be telepathic, and the 'first' time he uses those powers in any significant capacity on page in Cable #19 comes as a surprise to everyone including his own son.
You run into a lot of that sort of thing when you start trying to make sense of back issues.
Chapter 7