AK/DM - Kyle and Doug versus Milan

[x-wildchild.livejournal.com]

While Crystal and Laurie take care of "Kid Omega" and Forge battles robots to shut the power down, Kyle and Doug go after Milan. It doesn't quite go as they'd hoped.




"Okay, we're clear." Doug still wasn't a hundred percent clear on what Forge had done to locate Milan, because he'd started talking in 'drinking from the firehose' babble about halfway through. But whatever Forge made worked. It was like a fundamental law of the universe. He adjusted his grip on the hanger rod he'd pried loose from the closet and wished again for something a little less improvised in the way of weaponry. He made a mental note to talk to someone about it when they got home. Maybe North, despite his insistence on referring to Doug as 'monkey'.

Kyle had paid even less attention to Forge's explanations of anything, including how they'd blocked the cameras. It worked, he trusted it would work, and if it didn't work, they were so screwed it wasn't even funny so it had to work. Besides, Forge hadn't let him down yet. "Right." He'd spent the time filing down his claws to almost nothing, and then taping his hands and feet. Claws were great for fighting, not so great for moving around a big empty stairwell quietly, and really not great for trying to subdue some crazy technopath without hurting him. Much.

"Smells and sounds empty to me." All Kyle could hear was his and Doug's hearts and breathing. Anything moving around in the stairwell that wasn't good at moving silently would echo like crazy. Like robots, or crazy technopaths. "Gimme about a..." Dammit, he so wasn't used to fighting alongside someone who didn't have some kind of physical power. "ten second head start, in case Milan's got something to ambush us?"

Doug nodded and gestured for Kyle to precede him, taking a long ten-count in his head before following quietly in the feral mutant's wake. His eyes swept the stairwell, especially alert for anything that might be trying to sneak up from their rear.

Kyle had almost been hoping for ambush, to be able to take out his bad mood on something inanimate that he didn't have to hold back on. His expression as Doug met up with him at the door to the floor they'd located Milan on was impatient and annoyed. "Still got nothing. You think he doesn't know we're coming after him?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm sure he knows." Given that Milan and Quentin had to be expecting a fight, Doug let Kyle's chattiness slide. It wasn't as though they needed to be completely stealthy, per se. The pair had left them with no real option but to come after them. He grabbed Kyle's attention with a wave of his hand, then indicated the door out of the stairwell. He signaled 'one, two, three' with his fingers, then kicked at the pushbar, slamming the door against its stops.

The door flew open, a thud on the other side indicating that Doug's kick had not only opened the door, but pushed back whatever had been pushed up against it. A quick peek into the hallway showed a conference-room chair lying on it's side on the floor, and Kyle shook his head. "Dude, do these guys even know how to barricade something?" And people said he watched too much TV. "I kinda feel bad for them."

"Don't underestimate them," Doug told Kyle. The comment was at least as much for his own benefit as Kyle's. He'd underestimated Quentin, and assumed that the telepath would remain limited by needing to touch someone. "For all that Milan's kind of a spaz, he's plenty dangerous. He nearly killed Forge last time we encountered him." But for the strange electric ghost of Nikolai Tesla, Forge would have died. Doug shook the thought off and stalked silently up one side of the hallway, wordlessly portioning off an area of responsibility and leaving the other one to Kyle.

"Yeah, but..." Kyle snapped his mouth shut at the look from Doug and continued on. The level they were on only had a few doors, and he grunted as the power cut off. "No way he doesn't know we're here now..." he muttered. But Forge had managed to cut the power, which meant the electronic locks were disabled.

That was the danger in this sort of scenario. When you were the ones kicking the doors in, the other guys were the ones who were laying in wait and knew there were a finite number of ways you could come at them. But Doug and Kyle had seen fighting, and Doug knew from his recollections of Tesla's tower in Croatia that Milan wasn't the sort that was prepared for that sort of thing.

The Women's locker room was empty, and the pair moved across the hall to the doorway facing opposite. Doug went first this time and stomped at the wood just above the keycard reader.

The door cracked and bounced off something heavy, and Kyle and Doug saw only the back of a retreating Francisco Milan, who had tried - in vain - to push a weight bench up against the doorway when he heard them in the hallway. Unfortunately for Milan, the bench was far larger than anything he could move quickly, and he only got it close enough to keep the door from opening all the way. As he fled into the other room, they could hear him stuttering out a command to 'dial Kid Omega." repeated several times.

"Go away! I will leave you alone if you go away!"

"Yeah, I don't see that happening, Milan." Kid Omega? Who the hell was Kid Omega, Doug asked himself. He lunged at the door to move the bench further back and create space for both him and Kyle to enter the room. "There's that warrant out for your arrest in Italy, for starters, and then there's trying to drown me in the goddamn shower!" He kept the hanger dowel at the ready as they moved toward the room Milan had retreated into.

As Kyle and Doug approached, they heard another door slam, and more frantic commands from Milan. "Dude, he's wanted in Italy? Fail." He stalked his way into the room, pointing at the closed door across from them, and shook his head. "Bathroom. He just ran and hid in the bathroom. What the hell?" They were kicking down so many damn doors it wasn't even funny. This one didn't even have an electronic lock, and Kyle's kick opened it easily.

The locker room bathrooms were cavernous, with several full showers, a tub-with-jacuzzi, and rows of sinks-and-mirrors. The door to the smaller room where the stalls were was open, showing it to be empty, not that it mattered, since the soft sounds of someone moving in one of the closed showers were obvious. Kyle pulled the door open, to see Milan with a Kevlar vest on over his shirt, waving a short baton with two prongs on one end around wildly. "I can defend myself! I can! I will not let you take me to the jail!"

Kyle stopped for a moment, and shrugged. "Dude, is that a Taser?"

"It is a Panther stun baton, and it can deliver..." For once in his life Milan took in the expressions of the people who were speaking to him and shut up.

Kyle glanced over his shoulder at Doug. "He has a Taser. You've met Jan, right? This is like foreplay." he said, before he ran at Milan. As Kyle had expected, Milan flailed with the baton, striking him on the shoulder. The young feral fell convulsing but conscious as the stun baton expended its single charge.

Doug's brain barely had time to catch up with Kyle's train of thought before he lunged and took the charge from the stun baton. As Kyle collapsed to the ground, Doug realized that the other man had opened him a small window of opportunity before the baton would recharge. So even as Kyle was falling, Doug was moving forward, using his improvised staff to knock the baton out of Milan's hand and across the floor. He dropped the dowel and grabbed the Italian by the lapels of his Kevlar jacket and pivoted, tossing him to slide hard against the wall under the sinks. He stalked forward, a hard, dangerous look in his eyes.

"You cannot hurt me, Douglas Ramsey. Quentin has told me all of your secrets!" Milan pushed himself up and crept forward. "He has told me how you have nightmares about a machine that eats you, and how some of those nightmares are memories!" He pulled himself forward and grabbed at Doug's ankle. "Maybe when the Russian woman who is a machine ate you and spat you out, she made you into a machine." As he grabbed, the pupils of Milan's eyes dilated until they were pinpricks, leaving the technopath's eyes an eerily solid green.

Doug was startled, standing stock still as Milan's words echoed in his ears. The thought that there might be some piece of Ignatova still within him -did- haunt his dreams. The fear of losing his humanity into a machine form was one that Emma had locked away, but her psychic therapy had brought it back, and been the cause of some of his nightmares since. Still...

"Only one way to find out," he growled at the technopath kneeling at his feet. He balled up a fist and grinned. "Stop it if you can."
--

The smack of fist on flesh demonstrated clearly that Milan's desperate gamble, and Doug's deep fear, were unfounded. Doug easily brushed aside Milan's arm and hit him again. He grabbed the technopath's ankle as he tried to crawl away, in an ironic reversal of the earlier attempt Milan had made to control him, and bore him face-first into the tile floor. He pinned one arm with his knee and got his own arm around the other man's throat in a choke hold. "Things not working out quite like you planned, eh, Milan?" Doug growled. The urge to snap Milan's neck was a strong one, and his arm tightened ever so slightly.

A hand closed around Doug's wrist, not hard enough to restrain, but just enough to get the linguist's attention. Not Kyle's hand, either. A metal one - albeit missing two fingers - grasped Doug's wrist.

One eye swollen shut, face stained with blood and grease, Forge shook his head. "No," he said quietly. "It's over, Doug."

Doug looked up and nodded, dropping a whimpering Milan to the floor, but keeping one knee firmly in the other man's back. "The girls take care of Quentin?" he asked harshly, turning his head to check on Kyle's condition.

"They'll do fine," Forge rasped out, not taking his hand from Doug's arm. "Doug, please. Stand down. He's not a threat."

"Wrong." Milan had finally wiggled his arm free. Faster than anyone could've expected, he grabbed the fallen stun baton and spat out a "Shock him" in Italian while swinging his arm up towards Doug's hip.

Doug had time for half of a startled exclamation before his entire body suddenly stopped obeying the commands from his brain as his nerve endings all fired at once. The rest of his breath expelled in a grunt as he fell to the floor, twitching and convulsing just the same way Kyle had.

Forge looked at his arm, which was suddenly numb and limp, with a series of red LEDs slowly clicking back to green. "Huh," he said absently. "Surge protector worked."

Glancing down to Doug and Kyle, he looked over at Milan across the floor, but didn't make any movement towards the technopath. "I'm not going to hurt you," he said after a second of silence. "I need to help my friends. But I would like it if you would put that down, and then come with me. I can get you help, Francisco. You don't have to keep running."

Milan very unsteadily got to his feet, still holding the stun baton. "You could have changed everything for people like us. You could have stayed with Magneto and helped him! You could have changed the whole world!" He crossed the room slowly. He rubbed at the red mark on his cheek where Doug had punched him and blinked several times rapidly, eyes still dilated, and the baton sparked several times before dying. "I do not need help from anyone like you. I have my own friends, and they will help me without making me a traitor to my genes."

"I'm going to change things, I promise," Forge said, keeping his hands by his side and stepping out of Milan's way. "Look, all I'm saying... if... if you get tired of running, you know where to find me."

"Why would I want to find you?" Milan asked angrily. He didn't want for an answer, half-running half-stumbling out of the room as fast as he could.

It was the squeak of Milan's sneakers on the tile floor of the locker that got Kyle's attention back from trying to figure out if he could move anything at all, and he finally flopped over, limbs still heavy and hard to control. "The fuck just happened?" He slurred out.

Forge just stood there, looking somewhat sad as he stared out into the empty hall.

"He got away."