Cain and Logan get reacquainted via the Danger Room

[x-juggernaut.livejournal.com]

Logan comes across Cain training in the Danger Room, and is surprised that the cranky groundskeeper has joined the team. So in a display of overbearing machismo and testosterone poisoning, they decide to up the stakes of the scenario - with results best qualified as BAD. It gets violent and messy. They are in SO much trouble.




Logan was restless and the Danger Room was booked. By some joker calling himself "Juggernaut", if the computer could be believed. Curious, he made his way up to the Command Booth to get a good look at the program that was running.

Cain resisted the urge to duck the first drone that came in at head-height, letting it careen off the side of his head and crash to the ground. From experience, he knew these ones tended to explode into a sticky foam, so he kept moving out of the device's range.

This run was supposed to be simple. Just tag the blinking panel on the wall of the Danger Room. Thing is, the panel kept moving every five seconds, half the time changing walls. Storm had told him it was supposed to simulate a teleporting opponent that was endangering civilians.

"With what?" Cain had asked, "Horrible circus stories?"

Shortly after being trounced by Nightcrawler on the obstacle course, Cain recanted his skepticism and ran the scenario.

_THIS_ was the guy calling himself the Juggernaut? Big, yeah, but the world had no shortage of big men. Tough bastard too, or at least too slow to give a shit about defense. Lighting up a cigar in defiance of the strict NO SMOKING policy in the Danger Room, he kicked his heels up onto the panel to watch. May as well enjoy this before he could go get a real workout.

The final wave of drones sailed by Cain, dropping a pattern of metal fibers that formed into a net in midair. Cain simply sidestepped, let the mesh entangle his outstretched fist, and swung it around to catch the drones, watching them drop to the floor and buzz in place.

Pausing, Cain watched the blinking square on the wall. Far wall, high right. Then left wall, floor level. Left wall, high right. Right wall, low center. He got the timing down, then ran forward, changing direction in the middle of the floor like a running back avoiding a linebacker's tackle.

Just as he juked, a massive piston shot out of the floor under him, catapulting him into the air. Falling face-first, Cain growled, slamming his hand into the wall just as the square blinked out and reappeared on another wall.

Logan laughed as Cain got pistoned. Pratfalls were always funny, and didn't require memories he didn't have. But something was tickling the back of his head about the way Cain flopped there in the Danger Room. And for some reason he smelled something _rank_ - like something was rotting in the sun.

Growling, Cain charged across the Danger Room, swinging at the wall just tenths of a second after his target vanished again. Letting out a bellow, he saw the target appear all the way across the Danger Room.

Not about to be embarassed again, Cain reached out in frustration and palmed one of the drones he'd knocked down. Winding his arm back, he hurled the small sphere, striking the target dead-center. The lights in the Danger Room flashed once, twice, three times - the standard "end simulation" signal.

Logan clapped slowly for Cain's victory, making sure that he could hear it by switching on the Live Mike switch. "Bravo." he said with a nasty grin. Still, he couldn't get the smell of rotting - vegetation? - out of his nose. Something was seriously tickling his memory here, and ignoring it wasn't making it go away. "You want a real run or more of this playing tag crap?"

Cain looked up to the control booth, shading his eyes from the lights. "Logan." It came out as more of an epithet than anything else. "Sounds like they're letting you off your leash, huh?"

That phrase - off your leash - added to the itch in the back of his head. "So - you want something real or just more of the same crap?" he asked. "Or do you want to just chase the colored lights?"

"I ain't a rookie to this, sport," Cain quipped, cracking his knuckles and swinging his arms at his sides. "I've taken everything this place can throw at me and earned my spot. You think you've got something to keep me on my toes? Bring it."

Logan started punching buttons - it was a good thing for him he'd just finished reading the Danger Room HOWTO written by King of the I Hate Him So Much, Grr Doug Ramsey. "Fine." he said. "Give me ten and you'll be up." he said, still furiously punching buttons and searching for the right routines to use.

Chuckling, Cain could hear the buzzing and beeping over the microphone that told him Logan was having just as much trouble with the computers as Cain had the first time he tried to operate them.

The computer-intoned phrase "Safeties off..." cut his laughter off, however. Refusing to look up at the booth, Cain flexed his fists and dropped into a low crouch as the sound of the hidden machinery rose to a dull hum.

The next thing Logan did was kill the lights entirely, then bring them up into a dim night-time pattern. Then he added sounds - insects buzzing, bird and monkey calls, and the rustlings of other, bigger things out in the distance. Then he added smells - that was apparently one of those undocumented features that McCoy so adored. The smell was unmistakable to anyone who'd spent any time in the jungles of Viet Nam - rotting vegetation, stagnant water, and sulphorous mud.

That son of a bitch, Cain thought, instinctively dropping to a knee and reaching for a nonexistent rifle. "So we're taking a tour, huh?" he called out. "Seen all this before, you planning on testing how bored I can get?"

That's when things took a turn for the fantastic. The bots that came out of the twilight darkness were not _exactly_ human - they scuttled on retrograde legs and had distended maws full of sharp teeth and arms too long for their frame tipped in claws.. Behind Cain five 'bots appeared up out of the floor - standard humanoid models draped in olive drab. "Think you can get your boys out, Private?" Logan said around his cigar.

"Semper fi, motherfucker," Cain intoned, stepping forward. The first bot scuttled from the darkness, like something out of one of those sci-fi horror movies the kids loved. Cain met it with a flat punch to the chest, making it tumble backwards as two more took its place.

The staccato pounding of machine guns seemed to echo through the Danger Room. Cain forced himself to stay calm as he continued to repel the ever increasing numbers of opponents.

"Sarge? Sarge, get us out of here!"

"Oh god, my legs! Marko, where are my legs?"

"CORPSMAN! In the name of God, corpsman!"

This wasn't the simulation. The dummies behind him couldn't talk, they couldn't scream, they couldn't know what the ambush was like. Cain's vision wavered red, and things... changed.

Before him now, the alien robots were replaced by North Vietnamese regulars in their black pajamas, Chinese-made AK-47s at the hip, stalking through the high grass in a defilade, a line of continuous fire designed to chop a patrol into quivering meat. An ambush tactic with a 90% kill ratio.

Back then, he had run. The only one left alive, Cain Marko had run.

Today there was no running. There was only anger. There was only the Juggernaut, stepping forward to kill. And he would not be stopped.

Logan was half-watching Marko lose it against the drones and half-remembering something out of his life. A LRRP out in the Suck, him and a half-dozen of his best boys. Roaming from village to village, taking what they wanted and putting the rest to the torch. But now there was some new threat - some jungle-god given life according to the locals. Their orders - well, bugger their orders. They were Gods of War, Lords of the Jungle, and they took what they wanted and went where they willed. They were Death incarnate, and tonight, Death came for all of them.

Cain struggled to close his eyes. This wasn't right, this wasn't now. This was a goddamned simulation. He was in control. He was in control, not some memory that kept rising to the surface like dead fish on the lake.

"COMPUTER!" he bellowed, slamming both fists into the ground. "End program, emergency code Juggernaut one one one!"

The computer, true to its programming, shut down the program. But the lights stayed off, turning the cavernous Danger Room into a almost Stygian blackness. A blackness disrupted by the soft sibilant breathing of a predator. A predator on the hunt. A predator who dropped from the command booth to the ground without a concern for damage done to knees and back. Damage that was even now repairing itself.

~You can't make me go back.~ Logan said in fluent rural Vietnamese. ~I won't go back!~

Cain heard Logan land, and was moving even before the emergency lights came up in soft red. "You son of a bitch!" he hollered, turning to throw a haymaker in the shorter X-Man's direction.

Logan was much quicker than he looked, and ducked under the haymaker to deliver his own full-power punch to Cain's exposed short ribs. For all the good it did him - Cain was too tough and slugging him with his bare hands was like hitting steel. But for some reason the claws stayed in and he tried again, following up his first shot with a short hammer-blow to the same spot.

The little bastard hit like a freight train, Cain realized. However, he was the man who'd played chicken with a freight train and won. Slapping one arm down to block Logan's next punch, Marko brought the point of his other elbow down squarely on top of the berserker's head with enough force to shatter concrete.

Luckily for Logan adamantium was a lot tougher than concrete. His brain didn't even bounce too badly inside its unbreakable casing. Logan used his vantage point of being directly underneath the strike to use himself as a fulcrum point and see if he could send Cain up and over, and maybe bust up his arm at the same time.

Cain was taken off his feet by the momentum of his own blow, expertly redirected by Logan. In a second, Wolverine was on him, bending Cain's left arm behind his back and rearing back for an adamantium-laced punch to the back of the neck.

Expecting it, Cain hauled his legs under him, flipping over and throwing his teammate-turned-opponent across the Danger Room. In the crimson emergency lights, Logan looked almost blood-crazed. Cain cocked back a fist, daring the smaller man to charge him.

"I swear to God," he called out, "I get a hand on you and I will end you like they shoulda done years ago."

Logan was starting to come out of his flashback, but enough of it remained to cloud his thinking and goad him into continuing his attack. Still, however, the claws stayed in. "The boys in Washington can't be permitted to get their hands on me! I don't care what you think I've done, if they get me I'm done!" he said in English this time, but a heavily-Southeast Asia-accented English. As he spoke he was already on his feet and charging.

Crazy motherfucker... Cain thought, gauging the distance and speed of Logan's approach. He reached out with his left hand, timing it just so that when Logan dodged right, he met Cain's outstretched knuckles, moving with amazing speed right under his chin.

Such was the force of Cain's uppercut that Logan was lifted directly off his feet in a graceful arc before he hit the ground. His teeth flew like popcorn along with a severed chunk of his tongue. When he hit, the jar to his brain was enough to send him into protective coma-land while his healing factor repaired the bruising to his brain as well as his dental and tongue-related failures.

In a flash, Cain was over Logan, knee on his chest, both fists raised for a strike to the head - but the other man was out cold. Almost on autopilot, Cain reached down to his neck. Yeah, still a pulse. He hadn't killed him.

"Darn," he whispered, looking skyward. Reaching into his pocket, he keyed his communicator. "Infirmary? Yeah, we got an X-Man down in the Danger Room. No, it's Logan. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. ... Well, watch the fucking tape if you don't believe me. Just get down here with a stretcher. Right. Juggernaut out."

Glancing down at Logan, he snorted derisively, before giving him a small kick with his boot. "And it's Sergeant, you sawed-off psycho. You best live through this. We ain't done." Cain crouched against the wall by Logan and waited for his inevitable call into the team leaders' room.

"We ain't done by a long shot."