Time Stand Still || Entre Nous
Nov. 10th, 2020 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsDoug's already weird day gets a whole lot weirder, when Ellie uses Doug's own complicated 'I'm not a shapeshifter or possessed or otherwise not who I say I am' verification system to explain to him just exactly who she is.
Trigger Warning: Discussions of death and violence.
It'd taken a little bit longer than it probably should have to recognize the skeletal, sickly man sitting next to Miss Frost the Elder, but once she had, Ellie's mind had gone a little bit blank. Same hair, same eyes, but his cheeks were hollow and his skin was palid. He had a cane, for crying out loud. Something was horrifically wrong and it threw her so badly she actually found herself approaching him with such complete disregard for everyone else in the room that her mom and dad would've been ashamed of her.
Doug was levering himself up from the chair at the end of the little impromptu lie-detector routine he'd been doing with Emma. Everyone checked out, even the six year old. More than once he'd caught a member of the group on the other side of the room with Jean and Topaz looking his way, and his brain was...trying to tell him something. The amount of information input from the group he'd been with hadn't left him much bandwidth to figure it out, but now she was apparently coming across the room directly toward him, and his eyebrow furrowed in concentration.
Doubting that this was going to go anywhere good, Ellie let the anger she'd been trying to suppress explode through her, spitting, "Hitter," at him with her eyes narrowed.
That explained at least some of what he was getting off this girl's body language.
In a world of shapeshifters, body possession, telepathic control, and any number of ways to compromise someone before even starting to talk about more mundane methods of influencing a person to betray themselves and the people closest to them, Doug had spent a very long period of time over the years creating and honing a system for verifying that people were who they said they were. What he'd settled on was a system of call-and-response verification triggers, particular to each of his teammates. But rather than a simple string of words and replies lasting a few seconds, the system he'd created...
Well, he likened it more to a chess match. In the same way that grandmasters would execute a series of rote openings that would have commentators saying things like "and then a Sicilian Najdorf ensued", followed by a midgame of exchanges and then an endgame, so was Doug's system for checking a person to make sure they were on the level. It was complex, with almost...something like subordinate clauses within a sentence. Spots for a person to subtly signal that they were not safe, or pass a variety of information encoded within words, phrases, numbers, and letters.
Sort of the apotheosis of Doug's powers, really.
But before it all, the greeting of the system, if you will, came a series of four words and a short sentence. And this young woman who he was still trying to get a bead on had just thrown the first of them at him.
"Hacker," he replied instinctively.
Unbelievable. Ellie literally could not believe that the death-warmed-over man before her had actually responded accurately. This couldn't be right. She'd have heard about this from someone. She'd been in the mansion by this point! She'd remember this. "Grifter," she hissed, fingers curling into fists at her sides.
This could not be happening.
First, the Topaz, evil Topaz, was here and fucking up all their plans, and now this travesty of a man had the nerve to know how to respond to her?
Doug didn't need to be an empath to read the waves of anger coming off of her body language. She didn't seem mad at him, per se, more at the situation? Too many question marks. He paused to recenter himself, leaning against the cane. He knew those eyes. Extremely well, in fact. From his mirror every morning. And that chin, from the person he woke up next to most mornings, assuming she had slept that night.
Who on earth was this person walking around with a blend of his and Marie-Ange's features?
Thankfully, he had long practice in schooling his features to show little of the shock he was feeling as he continued. "Thief."
No, no, no. Ellie struggled to keep her physical reactions from showing, but she was fighting a losing battle against dizziness and nausea just from the whiplash of all these revelations hitting her at once.
It was all wrong. Everything was wrong.
This is what they got for allowing the six year old to navigate them into the past. This is what they got for allowing a walking dead woman to convince them to allow the six year old to navigate. Would they even be able to get back to where they were supposed to be? Would they be able to fix anything? Would they get back and everything would be exactly the same except much, much worse because ultimately they'd failed?
Would they even go back to the right place and time, if they were in the wrong place and time now?
Oh God.
What if they never got to go home? What if everyone who'd been dead was just dead and she actually wasn't ever going to be able to see her parents again?
Compressing those thoughts into the teeny, tiniest little box she could find in her mind, Ellie locked it and threw the key away. None of them could afford for her to lose it completely. They didn't have time for her to lose it.
She'd need to find a new therapist.
"We provide..." She said, tonelessly.
"Leverage." Doug recognized that bit of dissociation entirely too well, and he had a nasty suspicion he knew who had taught her how to lock everything away and get the job done like that. It would also explain how she knew to prompt Doug the way she had. And since she'd opened the game, as it were, Doug was the one on the hook to prove his bona fides first.
"Alan Turing."
"Kevin Metnick," Ellie shot back, voice still expressionless. She was going to get this done. They were going to figure this out. She was not going to have to get a new therapist, dammit, it'd taken her forever to find one she worked well with. She was not starting that whole process over again, not least of all because she obviously had way more trauma to work through now than she had when she'd started seeing the one she had.
Doug couldn't quite stop the derisive snort at the name of the 'famous hacker', and the professional belief that if you were famous, you were doing the wrong things, because the whole point was to never be noticed. Though that was actually a tiny piece of the code as well, that reaction that couldn't quite be faked or suppressed. "Ferdinand de Saussure," he continued. Where the opening was an easy bit of pop culture to know, his own codes were a mix of historical and fictional personages. Most of the time he'd spent on this system involved ensuring that there were few if any patterns to the codes, balancing his own 'meme trash' nature with being extremely aware of his own tendencies. There was a reason he spent so much time on the Genre Savvy page of TV Tropes, after all.
Ellie dropped, "John Cleverly Cartney," since he wasn't the father of modern linguistics, a brilliant hacker, or a codebreaker all wrapped up in one hell of a Hellfire reference. She cut her eyes to the side, checking in on her people where they were scattered around the room, before laser focusing back on the man in front of her.
Was he having trouble standing for long periods of time? Is that why he repositioned himself with the cane? Was there something wrong with his legs? Scratch that. There was obviously something wrong with all of him. Based purely on observation, she could tell he weighed at least thirty pounds less than he should, probably more, and his health... was failing? Was it?
Why was his health failing? And where were the people who were supposed to be taking care of him?
And one last bit of whimsy and wish all in one to finish. "The goddamn Batman," he rasped out in his best impression of the vigilante, because who wouldn't want to have that much money to spend on fancy gadgets and vehicles and so on? Doug just had to make do with Emma's expense account, which, to be fair, went quite a long way.
Well, he'd proved who he was to this young lady, now it remained to be seen who she was.
Heart stumbling over itself for just a moment at the actual confirmation, Ellie ignored the tightening in her chest and gave something of an answer to him... more than she'd given anyone else in this blasted place full of all the wrong people. "Sunglasses." Time traveler.
They'd already more or less confirmed that the group wasn't from 'around here', in terms of time and space. But to hear it confirmed in the code he'd crafted still caused Doug to raise an eyebrow, unable to completely mask his surprise. He'd given a lot of thought to the 'Back to the Future effect', as he was prone to calling it, where changes in events could cause ripple effects down the timeline. Pictures of family could change, entire lives could spell out differently because of small influences.
So he'd settled on a theory, the best he could come up with. The farther back the reference, the less likelihood of 'butterfly effect' causing divergence. But it would also be useful to have a way to measure the divergence, if that was possible. So he'd settled on this particular string - a group of items connected to time travel and fate, from a movie based on an old Philip K Dick short story. "Pack of cigarettes," he offered in reply.
He expected twenty items, and the number that would match up would determine how close things were. If they all matched...
"Bus pass."
"Diamond ring."
"Paperclip."
"Cookie fortune."
He could only imagine what this looked like to the others in the room. Of them all, only Emma would likely understand what was happening - he was still working out responses with Topaz for her own set.
"Janitor key."
"Lighter."
"Hairspray."
"Matchbook."
"Allcom pass."
There was a rhythm between them, like they'd practiced this so many times as to become rote. If nothing else, that sense of instinctive familiarity would have the wheels turning in his head, as impossible as the conclusions seemed to him.
"BMW key."
"Looking glass."
"Stamp."
"Ball bearing."
"Allen wrench."
"Eisenhower dollar coin."
Even the tiny details matched, the names of companies and people. Which suggested that the point of divergence, whenever it was, was 'downstream'. Which certainly gave credence to the idea that the group was here to stop some imminent calamity, they'd want to catch it before things went wrong.
"Crossword puzzle."
"Bullet."
"Watch."
Twenty for twenty, and Doug paused, trying to determine the next move of the bizarre dance between them. "Vorlon," he interjected before she could speak again. A single request.
Who are you?
Such a simple question.
Such a complex question.
And yet.
"Leia Berenstein," Ellie answered.
Well, there it was. I am your father. Which was actually its own bit of 'Mandela Effect' right along with the whole Berenstain Bears thing. Everyone convinced that Vader actually said, "Luke, I am your father," when he didn't in fact address his son by name.
"...and what should I call my daughter?" he asked in Asgardian, his voice rough with emotion.
Despite her control over herself, Ellie's breath caught just at the back of her throat before she replied in the same language, "My name is Eleanor Camacho Wilson Ramsey Colbert." Then she reached up and switched off her image inducer - she'd already seen Tally do it, so it wasn't like she was sharing more secrets than she should. Plus, she'd have worn a completely different face for this mission if she'd known they were going to be dropped into the middle of a goddamn alternate universe.
Fuck.
Her eyes didn't tear up, though, as she raised them to look at this ailing version of the man who'd actually raised her. She just stared at him, trying to find her dad somewhere in him and coming up short. "But I prefer Ellie," she murmured, still in Asgardian so fluent it was like she'd been born speaking it.
Doug had thought he'd already gotten the gut punch.
But the shimmering fade of image inducer, and what it left behind, had him short of breath. He could see it in those expressive eyebrows, already knew what they'd look like waggling after a stupid joke. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see all three of them in her - Angie's stubborn set to her shoulders, his own analytic scrunching face on her features as she took him in, looking for a different Doug Ramsey. Wade's effortless charm, the way he could take over a room just by walking in, some Mexican monstrosity in his hand. His heart felt the pang of loss all over again.
He could practically read her history like a book, the pages written in every little habit and quirk. He could see a nervous little four-year-old tumbling out of a yellow cab at the gates of the mansion, hastily-scrawled yellow Post-Its all over her tiny backpack. And now that same girl, grown into a young woman and trying so hard to do her parents proud.
He'd thought, against all odds, that he had somehow had a child, just as he was starting to come to peace with the idea that children were not a thing he would ever have in his life. But somehow, the reality was even more precious, strange, and terrifying all at once.
Because in any universe, of course the only people a clinging-to-the-edges-of-his-sanity Wade Wilson would trust to raise his daughter would be his 'ladybird' and his 'manfriend'.
Doug dropped the cane and put his arm around Ellie's shoulders, pulling her into a rough hug until it wasn't clear who was holding whom up. "It'll be okay, mi hija," he murmured, eyes bright with tears. With the hand that wasn't around her shoulders, he fished his phone out of his pocket and stabbed his thumb at the screen.
"Call Angie."
Ellie let him hug her, somewhat shell shocked by his reaction, but then she supposed she shouldn't be. Still, her eyes remained tearless as she blinked blankly over his shoulder for a moment. Great. They were bringing her mom into this now.
She was going to have to have such a strange conversation with Nate once things had somehow settled.
--
After Doug calls Marie-Ange, they sit down and have a very awkward conversation with Ellie.
Ellie was sitting on a couch. All things considered, it was a pretty comfortable couch. Not so plush she sank into the cushions and couldn't get back out, but not so stiff that it was actually uncomfortable. The fabric was nice.
Her not-dad was in the room with her. It was weird.
She'd managed to find a place inside her brain where it seemed like everything was calm - at least for the moment. She was mentally running through some of the breathing exercises her therapist had recommended - she'd had so much therapy since her mom died and her bio-dad showed up. She was very, very good at doing her therapy homework.
Unfortunately, there wasn't much a therapist could do to prepare you for the events she was currently experiencing. Which meant she was counting on the tried and true method of breath control and analytical thinking about her physical surroundings to remain calm.
Then, of course, her not-mom walked in and an audible half-gasp, half-choke broke from her throat. Things seemed to blur a little, just because she was having trouble focusing, but she was on her feet a moment later, hands partially extended and quivering next to her sides.
"What happened to you? Who did this?" Ellie asked, taking in her not-mom's missing eye - eyepatch - and the faint burn scarring just barely worked on. She didn't move forward, since she knew what her parents were capable of and god only knew what these not-versions could do. They'd obviously had a world of different experiences than her mom and dad, which meant they might manage to do even more damage.
Marie-Ange had answered the phone already down the stairs, only to hear Doug say "We have a Peter Bishop situation." and then hanging up, and she'd stared at the phone long enough to also get a text from Amanda before she continuned on.
She arrived to a headache of a situation, one of her headaches, the kind she would've dealt with by shaking a handful of pills out of a bottle and chewing them up in anger, or swallowing them dry. If headaches had even been a thing anymore.
Her hand reached for the pill bottle anyway and came up empty.
"Adam Destine." A catastrophic plane crash of telepathic information came her way, Doctor Grey and Emma Frost and a squeaky little mental voice that danced in just to comment on the really big bird and then scampered off. "I have every reason to believe you might know that name."
"Yeah," Ellie said, nodding numbly despite the not-mom standing in front of her. "Topaz lost her shit and killed him and everything went bad from there. We're here to stop it. Cause when she goes bad, she winds out taking a bunch of magic people with her and then a bunch of other people... and then most of our people."
Should she explain that they were dead now? Then? An alternate then? Should she mention death at all? Given she was probably pretty pale beneath her natural tan and she had a tension headache despite her healing factor, Ellie guessed they might be able to guess just from the circumstance. Hell, her not-mom probably did know already. Ridiculous precoggy thing.
Marie-Ange glanced at Doug. "It is a Peter Bishop situation. I hate that you have code words for these things."
Then she sat down, almost abruptly. "Amanda killed Adam. Months after he took my eye, and Doug was cursed. As I understand it, and if you know me at all, you know how well I know these things." She hated this. This was awful. This was so much operational insecurity that she was ready to scream. "You know I know he is well and truly dead. It cost us a great deal to end him."
"It cost us more for you not to," Ellie replied without thinking. Then she figured, what the fuck, right? They already knew about the alternate future she and the others had come from. What was a bit of death foreshadowing for a woman who routinely dealt with Odin's Ravens? "I think I'd rather she lost an eye and he got cursed than to have them both murdered. The cherry on top was bio-dad showing up and getting offed, too. So y'know."
"Yes, all things equal, I would rather have one eye and a life than two eyes and no life, or no eyes and no life." Marie-Ange's mouth quirked once, as though she was suppressing a very dark smile.
Doug nodded along. "I mean, I hate this magical equivalent of pernicious anemia or whatever-the-hell, but it still beats getting murdered and it sticking this time." How did you give a person condolences on the death of their parents when their parents were, y'know, you.
"Happen often?" Ellie asked. "With the not sticking?"
"Uhhhh...shit." The expression on Doug's face was beyond sheepish. He'd just assumed that in whatever universe, he and Angie would have been up front with their adoptive daughter about the nature of what they did. Then again, it didn't necessarily follow that -that- Doug had lived all the same experiences that he had. Maybe he hadn't been shot. Or digested. Or waterboarded. Or-
"...spoilers?" he asked tentatively.
"He's already dead," Ellie said, narrowing her eyes. "How much more spoiler-y can it get?" Also, her dad was in his late 40's, silver shooting through his blond hair, with noticeable laugh lines around his eyes and at the corners of his not-bloodless lips.
Though that was getting off track, she supposed. Wait, were they even on a track? What was the point of this conversation? Oh, no - she was totally on the right track, since the whole point was ultimately to get rid of their Topaz so she didn't do the same damn thing here that she'd done in her timeline. Maybe focusing on the whole "they're dead and they're you, so you better start helping us figure out how to stop her before she kills you, too" angle was the right way to go.
"Double shit." For someone who was all about communicating, Doug was sure bollocking this one up. Everything felt more weighty, trying to give advice to his kid. Well, not exactly his kid, but close enough. He wasn't sure how Angie was taking it, but having it all come down on him in a package of young adult bearing his name...it was a lot. "I didn't mean him being dead. I'm sorry. I meant that I've...come very close to that edge more than once. I just assumed that...the other me would have as well, and then I assumed again that he might have told you about it."
Marie-Ange shut her eye for a moment, and resisted the urge to go for the pill bottle again. She did not even have a pill bottle in her pocket, or purse, or anywhere nearby. It just felt like she was about to have a cluster of migraines.
"Doug was shot in high school. He was briefly a casualty during an attack on New York by a mutant terrorist, and he was waterboarded in Genosha. If none of those happened to your Doug... " She looked at Doug once, and then Ellie. "I cannot imagine why I would not have told you, even if he did not. Perhaps it happened differently. We are clearly different people from your... family."
"That's abundantly clear, yes," Ellie muttered. "And I dunno, it's not like we ever had sit-down family discussions about the multitudes of times people died or nearly died." In fact, she had it on good authority that her bio-dad did that a lot, bless him. But he was like her - impossible to kill. Or almost. She wished she'd taken his head or something, since there was a good chance he might've eventually regenerated, but if she'd done that... well, she wouldn't be here right now.
Which, again, completely off track.
"Anyway. Are we finished with the awkward 'hi, we're not your family' thing? I feel like that's gonna be a repeating theme for me and I'm already kinda over it." Ellie knew her therapist would frown mightily at her for basically shutting down, but at the same time, she was losing the will to deal with familiar faces that were just... ever so slightly still wrong.
"Sure." Doug nodded briskly. "If I backslide, someone elbow me."
Trigger Warning: Discussions of death and violence.
It'd taken a little bit longer than it probably should have to recognize the skeletal, sickly man sitting next to Miss Frost the Elder, but once she had, Ellie's mind had gone a little bit blank. Same hair, same eyes, but his cheeks were hollow and his skin was palid. He had a cane, for crying out loud. Something was horrifically wrong and it threw her so badly she actually found herself approaching him with such complete disregard for everyone else in the room that her mom and dad would've been ashamed of her.
Doug was levering himself up from the chair at the end of the little impromptu lie-detector routine he'd been doing with Emma. Everyone checked out, even the six year old. More than once he'd caught a member of the group on the other side of the room with Jean and Topaz looking his way, and his brain was...trying to tell him something. The amount of information input from the group he'd been with hadn't left him much bandwidth to figure it out, but now she was apparently coming across the room directly toward him, and his eyebrow furrowed in concentration.
Doubting that this was going to go anywhere good, Ellie let the anger she'd been trying to suppress explode through her, spitting, "Hitter," at him with her eyes narrowed.
That explained at least some of what he was getting off this girl's body language.
In a world of shapeshifters, body possession, telepathic control, and any number of ways to compromise someone before even starting to talk about more mundane methods of influencing a person to betray themselves and the people closest to them, Doug had spent a very long period of time over the years creating and honing a system for verifying that people were who they said they were. What he'd settled on was a system of call-and-response verification triggers, particular to each of his teammates. But rather than a simple string of words and replies lasting a few seconds, the system he'd created...
Well, he likened it more to a chess match. In the same way that grandmasters would execute a series of rote openings that would have commentators saying things like "and then a Sicilian Najdorf ensued", followed by a midgame of exchanges and then an endgame, so was Doug's system for checking a person to make sure they were on the level. It was complex, with almost...something like subordinate clauses within a sentence. Spots for a person to subtly signal that they were not safe, or pass a variety of information encoded within words, phrases, numbers, and letters.
Sort of the apotheosis of Doug's powers, really.
But before it all, the greeting of the system, if you will, came a series of four words and a short sentence. And this young woman who he was still trying to get a bead on had just thrown the first of them at him.
"Hacker," he replied instinctively.
Unbelievable. Ellie literally could not believe that the death-warmed-over man before her had actually responded accurately. This couldn't be right. She'd have heard about this from someone. She'd been in the mansion by this point! She'd remember this. "Grifter," she hissed, fingers curling into fists at her sides.
This could not be happening.
First, the Topaz, evil Topaz, was here and fucking up all their plans, and now this travesty of a man had the nerve to know how to respond to her?
Doug didn't need to be an empath to read the waves of anger coming off of her body language. She didn't seem mad at him, per se, more at the situation? Too many question marks. He paused to recenter himself, leaning against the cane. He knew those eyes. Extremely well, in fact. From his mirror every morning. And that chin, from the person he woke up next to most mornings, assuming she had slept that night.
Who on earth was this person walking around with a blend of his and Marie-Ange's features?
Thankfully, he had long practice in schooling his features to show little of the shock he was feeling as he continued. "Thief."
No, no, no. Ellie struggled to keep her physical reactions from showing, but she was fighting a losing battle against dizziness and nausea just from the whiplash of all these revelations hitting her at once.
It was all wrong. Everything was wrong.
This is what they got for allowing the six year old to navigate them into the past. This is what they got for allowing a walking dead woman to convince them to allow the six year old to navigate. Would they even be able to get back to where they were supposed to be? Would they be able to fix anything? Would they get back and everything would be exactly the same except much, much worse because ultimately they'd failed?
Would they even go back to the right place and time, if they were in the wrong place and time now?
Oh God.
What if they never got to go home? What if everyone who'd been dead was just dead and she actually wasn't ever going to be able to see her parents again?
Compressing those thoughts into the teeny, tiniest little box she could find in her mind, Ellie locked it and threw the key away. None of them could afford for her to lose it completely. They didn't have time for her to lose it.
She'd need to find a new therapist.
"We provide..." She said, tonelessly.
"Leverage." Doug recognized that bit of dissociation entirely too well, and he had a nasty suspicion he knew who had taught her how to lock everything away and get the job done like that. It would also explain how she knew to prompt Doug the way she had. And since she'd opened the game, as it were, Doug was the one on the hook to prove his bona fides first.
"Alan Turing."
"Kevin Metnick," Ellie shot back, voice still expressionless. She was going to get this done. They were going to figure this out. She was not going to have to get a new therapist, dammit, it'd taken her forever to find one she worked well with. She was not starting that whole process over again, not least of all because she obviously had way more trauma to work through now than she had when she'd started seeing the one she had.
Doug couldn't quite stop the derisive snort at the name of the 'famous hacker', and the professional belief that if you were famous, you were doing the wrong things, because the whole point was to never be noticed. Though that was actually a tiny piece of the code as well, that reaction that couldn't quite be faked or suppressed. "Ferdinand de Saussure," he continued. Where the opening was an easy bit of pop culture to know, his own codes were a mix of historical and fictional personages. Most of the time he'd spent on this system involved ensuring that there were few if any patterns to the codes, balancing his own 'meme trash' nature with being extremely aware of his own tendencies. There was a reason he spent so much time on the Genre Savvy page of TV Tropes, after all.
Ellie dropped, "John Cleverly Cartney," since he wasn't the father of modern linguistics, a brilliant hacker, or a codebreaker all wrapped up in one hell of a Hellfire reference. She cut her eyes to the side, checking in on her people where they were scattered around the room, before laser focusing back on the man in front of her.
Was he having trouble standing for long periods of time? Is that why he repositioned himself with the cane? Was there something wrong with his legs? Scratch that. There was obviously something wrong with all of him. Based purely on observation, she could tell he weighed at least thirty pounds less than he should, probably more, and his health... was failing? Was it?
Why was his health failing? And where were the people who were supposed to be taking care of him?
And one last bit of whimsy and wish all in one to finish. "The goddamn Batman," he rasped out in his best impression of the vigilante, because who wouldn't want to have that much money to spend on fancy gadgets and vehicles and so on? Doug just had to make do with Emma's expense account, which, to be fair, went quite a long way.
Well, he'd proved who he was to this young lady, now it remained to be seen who she was.
Heart stumbling over itself for just a moment at the actual confirmation, Ellie ignored the tightening in her chest and gave something of an answer to him... more than she'd given anyone else in this blasted place full of all the wrong people. "Sunglasses." Time traveler.
They'd already more or less confirmed that the group wasn't from 'around here', in terms of time and space. But to hear it confirmed in the code he'd crafted still caused Doug to raise an eyebrow, unable to completely mask his surprise. He'd given a lot of thought to the 'Back to the Future effect', as he was prone to calling it, where changes in events could cause ripple effects down the timeline. Pictures of family could change, entire lives could spell out differently because of small influences.
So he'd settled on a theory, the best he could come up with. The farther back the reference, the less likelihood of 'butterfly effect' causing divergence. But it would also be useful to have a way to measure the divergence, if that was possible. So he'd settled on this particular string - a group of items connected to time travel and fate, from a movie based on an old Philip K Dick short story. "Pack of cigarettes," he offered in reply.
He expected twenty items, and the number that would match up would determine how close things were. If they all matched...
"Bus pass."
"Diamond ring."
"Paperclip."
"Cookie fortune."
He could only imagine what this looked like to the others in the room. Of them all, only Emma would likely understand what was happening - he was still working out responses with Topaz for her own set.
"Janitor key."
"Lighter."
"Hairspray."
"Matchbook."
"Allcom pass."
There was a rhythm between them, like they'd practiced this so many times as to become rote. If nothing else, that sense of instinctive familiarity would have the wheels turning in his head, as impossible as the conclusions seemed to him.
"BMW key."
"Looking glass."
"Stamp."
"Ball bearing."
"Allen wrench."
"Eisenhower dollar coin."
Even the tiny details matched, the names of companies and people. Which suggested that the point of divergence, whenever it was, was 'downstream'. Which certainly gave credence to the idea that the group was here to stop some imminent calamity, they'd want to catch it before things went wrong.
"Crossword puzzle."
"Bullet."
"Watch."
Twenty for twenty, and Doug paused, trying to determine the next move of the bizarre dance between them. "Vorlon," he interjected before she could speak again. A single request.
Who are you?
Such a simple question.
Such a complex question.
And yet.
"Leia Berenstein," Ellie answered.
Well, there it was. I am your father. Which was actually its own bit of 'Mandela Effect' right along with the whole Berenstain Bears thing. Everyone convinced that Vader actually said, "Luke, I am your father," when he didn't in fact address his son by name.
"...and what should I call my daughter?" he asked in Asgardian, his voice rough with emotion.
Despite her control over herself, Ellie's breath caught just at the back of her throat before she replied in the same language, "My name is Eleanor Camacho Wilson Ramsey Colbert." Then she reached up and switched off her image inducer - she'd already seen Tally do it, so it wasn't like she was sharing more secrets than she should. Plus, she'd have worn a completely different face for this mission if she'd known they were going to be dropped into the middle of a goddamn alternate universe.
Fuck.
Her eyes didn't tear up, though, as she raised them to look at this ailing version of the man who'd actually raised her. She just stared at him, trying to find her dad somewhere in him and coming up short. "But I prefer Ellie," she murmured, still in Asgardian so fluent it was like she'd been born speaking it.
Doug had thought he'd already gotten the gut punch.
But the shimmering fade of image inducer, and what it left behind, had him short of breath. He could see it in those expressive eyebrows, already knew what they'd look like waggling after a stupid joke. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see all three of them in her - Angie's stubborn set to her shoulders, his own analytic scrunching face on her features as she took him in, looking for a different Doug Ramsey. Wade's effortless charm, the way he could take over a room just by walking in, some Mexican monstrosity in his hand. His heart felt the pang of loss all over again.
He could practically read her history like a book, the pages written in every little habit and quirk. He could see a nervous little four-year-old tumbling out of a yellow cab at the gates of the mansion, hastily-scrawled yellow Post-Its all over her tiny backpack. And now that same girl, grown into a young woman and trying so hard to do her parents proud.
He'd thought, against all odds, that he had somehow had a child, just as he was starting to come to peace with the idea that children were not a thing he would ever have in his life. But somehow, the reality was even more precious, strange, and terrifying all at once.
Because in any universe, of course the only people a clinging-to-the-edges-of-his-sanity Wade Wilson would trust to raise his daughter would be his 'ladybird' and his 'manfriend'.
Doug dropped the cane and put his arm around Ellie's shoulders, pulling her into a rough hug until it wasn't clear who was holding whom up. "It'll be okay, mi hija," he murmured, eyes bright with tears. With the hand that wasn't around her shoulders, he fished his phone out of his pocket and stabbed his thumb at the screen.
"Call Angie."
Ellie let him hug her, somewhat shell shocked by his reaction, but then she supposed she shouldn't be. Still, her eyes remained tearless as she blinked blankly over his shoulder for a moment. Great. They were bringing her mom into this now.
She was going to have to have such a strange conversation with Nate once things had somehow settled.
--
After Doug calls Marie-Ange, they sit down and have a very awkward conversation with Ellie.
Ellie was sitting on a couch. All things considered, it was a pretty comfortable couch. Not so plush she sank into the cushions and couldn't get back out, but not so stiff that it was actually uncomfortable. The fabric was nice.
Her not-dad was in the room with her. It was weird.
She'd managed to find a place inside her brain where it seemed like everything was calm - at least for the moment. She was mentally running through some of the breathing exercises her therapist had recommended - she'd had so much therapy since her mom died and her bio-dad showed up. She was very, very good at doing her therapy homework.
Unfortunately, there wasn't much a therapist could do to prepare you for the events she was currently experiencing. Which meant she was counting on the tried and true method of breath control and analytical thinking about her physical surroundings to remain calm.
Then, of course, her not-mom walked in and an audible half-gasp, half-choke broke from her throat. Things seemed to blur a little, just because she was having trouble focusing, but she was on her feet a moment later, hands partially extended and quivering next to her sides.
"What happened to you? Who did this?" Ellie asked, taking in her not-mom's missing eye - eyepatch - and the faint burn scarring just barely worked on. She didn't move forward, since she knew what her parents were capable of and god only knew what these not-versions could do. They'd obviously had a world of different experiences than her mom and dad, which meant they might manage to do even more damage.
Marie-Ange had answered the phone already down the stairs, only to hear Doug say "We have a Peter Bishop situation." and then hanging up, and she'd stared at the phone long enough to also get a text from Amanda before she continuned on.
She arrived to a headache of a situation, one of her headaches, the kind she would've dealt with by shaking a handful of pills out of a bottle and chewing them up in anger, or swallowing them dry. If headaches had even been a thing anymore.
Her hand reached for the pill bottle anyway and came up empty.
"Adam Destine." A catastrophic plane crash of telepathic information came her way, Doctor Grey and Emma Frost and a squeaky little mental voice that danced in just to comment on the really big bird and then scampered off. "I have every reason to believe you might know that name."
"Yeah," Ellie said, nodding numbly despite the not-mom standing in front of her. "Topaz lost her shit and killed him and everything went bad from there. We're here to stop it. Cause when she goes bad, she winds out taking a bunch of magic people with her and then a bunch of other people... and then most of our people."
Should she explain that they were dead now? Then? An alternate then? Should she mention death at all? Given she was probably pretty pale beneath her natural tan and she had a tension headache despite her healing factor, Ellie guessed they might be able to guess just from the circumstance. Hell, her not-mom probably did know already. Ridiculous precoggy thing.
Marie-Ange glanced at Doug. "It is a Peter Bishop situation. I hate that you have code words for these things."
Then she sat down, almost abruptly. "Amanda killed Adam. Months after he took my eye, and Doug was cursed. As I understand it, and if you know me at all, you know how well I know these things." She hated this. This was awful. This was so much operational insecurity that she was ready to scream. "You know I know he is well and truly dead. It cost us a great deal to end him."
"It cost us more for you not to," Ellie replied without thinking. Then she figured, what the fuck, right? They already knew about the alternate future she and the others had come from. What was a bit of death foreshadowing for a woman who routinely dealt with Odin's Ravens? "I think I'd rather she lost an eye and he got cursed than to have them both murdered. The cherry on top was bio-dad showing up and getting offed, too. So y'know."
"Yes, all things equal, I would rather have one eye and a life than two eyes and no life, or no eyes and no life." Marie-Ange's mouth quirked once, as though she was suppressing a very dark smile.
Doug nodded along. "I mean, I hate this magical equivalent of pernicious anemia or whatever-the-hell, but it still beats getting murdered and it sticking this time." How did you give a person condolences on the death of their parents when their parents were, y'know, you.
"Happen often?" Ellie asked. "With the not sticking?"
"Uhhhh...shit." The expression on Doug's face was beyond sheepish. He'd just assumed that in whatever universe, he and Angie would have been up front with their adoptive daughter about the nature of what they did. Then again, it didn't necessarily follow that -that- Doug had lived all the same experiences that he had. Maybe he hadn't been shot. Or digested. Or waterboarded. Or-
"...spoilers?" he asked tentatively.
"He's already dead," Ellie said, narrowing her eyes. "How much more spoiler-y can it get?" Also, her dad was in his late 40's, silver shooting through his blond hair, with noticeable laugh lines around his eyes and at the corners of his not-bloodless lips.
Though that was getting off track, she supposed. Wait, were they even on a track? What was the point of this conversation? Oh, no - she was totally on the right track, since the whole point was ultimately to get rid of their Topaz so she didn't do the same damn thing here that she'd done in her timeline. Maybe focusing on the whole "they're dead and they're you, so you better start helping us figure out how to stop her before she kills you, too" angle was the right way to go.
"Double shit." For someone who was all about communicating, Doug was sure bollocking this one up. Everything felt more weighty, trying to give advice to his kid. Well, not exactly his kid, but close enough. He wasn't sure how Angie was taking it, but having it all come down on him in a package of young adult bearing his name...it was a lot. "I didn't mean him being dead. I'm sorry. I meant that I've...come very close to that edge more than once. I just assumed that...the other me would have as well, and then I assumed again that he might have told you about it."
Marie-Ange shut her eye for a moment, and resisted the urge to go for the pill bottle again. She did not even have a pill bottle in her pocket, or purse, or anywhere nearby. It just felt like she was about to have a cluster of migraines.
"Doug was shot in high school. He was briefly a casualty during an attack on New York by a mutant terrorist, and he was waterboarded in Genosha. If none of those happened to your Doug... " She looked at Doug once, and then Ellie. "I cannot imagine why I would not have told you, even if he did not. Perhaps it happened differently. We are clearly different people from your... family."
"That's abundantly clear, yes," Ellie muttered. "And I dunno, it's not like we ever had sit-down family discussions about the multitudes of times people died or nearly died." In fact, she had it on good authority that her bio-dad did that a lot, bless him. But he was like her - impossible to kill. Or almost. She wished she'd taken his head or something, since there was a good chance he might've eventually regenerated, but if she'd done that... well, she wouldn't be here right now.
Which, again, completely off track.
"Anyway. Are we finished with the awkward 'hi, we're not your family' thing? I feel like that's gonna be a repeating theme for me and I'm already kinda over it." Ellie knew her therapist would frown mightily at her for basically shutting down, but at the same time, she was losing the will to deal with familiar faces that were just... ever so slightly still wrong.
"Sure." Doug nodded briskly. "If I backslide, someone elbow me."
