For Treason, Act II, Scene viii
May. 16th, 2026 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsSometimes, even if you see the trap coming, you have to step in it because the alternatives are much worse. Kyle starts to learn just how far he will have to go to protect his kids, and Weapon X sinks their hooks in a little deeper.
TW: Medical Experimentation, Indoctrination
Anytime he heard the hiss of the doors unlocking, Kyle went still. The tendons in his forearms twitched a little. His neck tensed. He ran inventory on his kids - Liam on his bed reading and eating a microwaved burrito, Jessie throwing darts, Celeste and Mindee watching a DVD.
Four guards this time. Armored, reflective helmets. The doctor who had collected Jessie weekly, Laura once, Kyle himself once to get the last of the bullet fragments out of his leg.
Kyle stood, claws dropped - and slid them back in deliberately. Waited.
"Not to worry, Mister Gibney, we're collecting Mister Nelson for some enhancement."
Liam raised an eyebrow and half sat up. Getting pulled out was never good, no matter who was doing it or why. "No," he started, tail twitching, moving away, further into the cell, "You can't do anything," he protested, knowing it was futile, but refusing to cave. His "training" as they called it was horrible and he wanted nothing to do with it.
"Hey, no, he's not.." Kyle stepped forward a little. "Look, I know, we're trying to train them up, and I'm going -as fast as I can-, but Liam didn't get the same training Laura did. He's like Jessie, he's like Celeste and Mindee. Nobody taught him how to do much more than self-defense." He folded his arms. "You want results, you need to let me fucking teach these kids, and not keep pulling them out to stick them full of needles or electrocute their faces three times a week. " They'd listened about Jessie. They'd fought him a little on the Frost girls. "At least warn me, okay? So I can adapt the lesson plans. What kind of enhancement?"
"Honestly, Mister Gibney. We had that discussion about how you are an educated man, and you can't infer from partial data? Tsk," the doctor clucked. "You have certainly deduced the nature of where you are by now, and I know that you spend time with one of the previous subjects of this particular bit of enhancement. Must I spell out everything for you?"
"Jesus fucking Christ." Kyle snarled and took another step forward, eyes narrowed, counting guards. If he moved fast, he could get two, even with the stun batons. Two more if he could shock Jessie and the Frost girls into helping. Which left the doctor, two more guards, and fuck knew how many more outside. And the wild card. Okay. Re-calibrate. Direct assault was not going to work.
"Do you want to waste the last six weeks of bullshit you've been putting us through? I barely have him benching his body weight. You want him combat capable faster, you give me time.. Are you ... " He looked at Liam. "You keep your ass on that cot. I'm in charge of you and I get to decide when you fucking need enhancement."
Liam curled up at the head of the cot, knees to chin, tail and ears tucked. He hadn't liked any of the 'enhancements' they'd done so far and he shifted on his bottom, taking his weight off automatically, remembering. He didn't know what Kyle thought they were going to do, but whatever it was, he could practically smell the rage with a tinge of fear coming off the older man.
"Even with your weight training and sparring regimens and...other considerations at play, I'm afraid Mister Nelson is likely to only ever be unsuitably...average." The doctor almost managed a paternal expression despite the subject matter and what they had already put Kyle and the others through. "We simply feel we need to...give him an edge. More than one."
It took way too much time to get the growl to stop rising up out of his chest. "Blame your fucking genetics division then, because you assholes made him that way. You want him to be better, go back in time and give him ...." Kyle let out an aggressive snarl. "Oh. Oh, fuck off with this." His eyes tracked over to Jessie and the red patches on her face, over to the Frost girls and the way that they circled each other like two magnets with identical poles, and back to Liam, obediently sitting on his cot. "You are not putting -that shit- into these kids."
The paternal look was replaced by an intense grin. "-There- he is." The doctor tapped at his tablet and cocked his head minutely at Kyle. "And how do you plan to prevent that, Mister Gibney?"
"What, is this some vampire shit, some Obereon and Titania shit, can't do it unless I invite you the fuck in?" Kyle shook his head slowly, took a step forward, watched the guards pull up those bullshit stun batons that hurt like a bitch. "Yeah I'm onto the game here, you're not gonna fuck up your investment by giving the kid with no healing factor that kind of enhancement, are you?"
"Your literary references notwithstanding, I find that these sorts of things tend to work out better when the subject...enters into it with open eyes, having chosen it for themselves." The doctor shrugged minutely. "More or less. The minutiae of informed consent in experimentation will have to be argued by others who are not so busy doing actual work."
~Remember,~ a ghostly voice echoed in the back of Kyle's head, ~you said you would do anything to keep them safe.~
The little tendons in Kyle's next twitched as he kept himself from whirling around to snarl at whichever of the Frost girls had said that. He inhaled and exhaled over and over, grounding himself in the rise and fall of his own chest. The fuckers could be patient, this was a setup anyway. "I need time to revise their training plans for my recovery period."
The doctor paged through several items on his tablet. "We can stretch recovery as long as four weeks if needed," he declared. "Revise the training accordingly, and your...proteges will be kept to the curriculum you designate."
"Four?" Fuck, he'd expected a generous two. How the fuck long did it take Logan to recover? It'd been days, right? "I'm writing lesson plans for six weeks. Do not fuck around with them, and don't send in a sub. " Kyle fought down the surge of bile in his mouth, the prickle of cold sweat on his lower back, the soothing warmth of ~You're taking care of your pack~ in the back of his head, in that same eerie rot-sweet mental voice. "they'll keep to it. They're good kids." They're good kids. They're -good- kids. Kids. He was letting them be kids as long as they could be.
"You have until the end of the day, Mister Gibney." The doctor took a sip from a coffee mug and turned toward the door. "We'll schedule the procedure for the first thing tomorrow morning. I recommend avoiding breakfast. We've found that there are less issues with the adamantium bonding on an empty stomach."
Kyle writes up his lesson plans for while he’ll be out, and has a…semi-philosophical conversation with the other captive adult in the facility.
TW: Medical Experimentation, Indoctrination, Gore, Self-Harm, Mental Illness, Suicidal Ideation
Six weeks. Paper and pen lesson plans. Paper and fucking felt tip pen. Kyle let his head hang low as he sat at the desk he'd been provided. Every little moment he wrung out of this was another hour closer to
His pen moved over the papers. Careful big block letters, ink smearing on the meat of his hand. His handwriting - already bad - was worse with fatigue and grief. His hands didn't shake. He still rent paper and threw it over the edge of the desk, started another list. He peeled a yellow post-it note off the next paper, and rolled his eyes. [watch What We Do in the Shadows eat snacks fanboy Wesley Snipes] was not in the lesson plan. He'd built in recreation time. Rest. Fuck, Liam had a line item for physical contact. Kidnapper-mandated-cuddle-time, what the fuck.
Another thing he did not have time to question.
Of course they didn't have any fucking clocks. He'd been measuring time with DVDs. Long documentaries from the history channel that he didn't need to pay attention to. Bridgerton. Game of Thrones. Anything long and boring he could ignore in the background but measure time by.
The door irised open. Maybe an hour early? Measuring time by DVD was not entirely accurate.
So far in his long and storied career - okay, like twelve? ish? thirteen? years? - the worst experiences had all happened offscreen except for the whole 'baby HF needs daddy to bleed' ocean-surf-in-his-eye one... and for the most part, he was pretty grateful to just have to wash up in a hospital bed and have yoghurt funneled down his throat. Except for this time. This time he was spitting... shards? Not nails, he wasn't a carpenter or a painter or anything, so no spitting nails. As he walked through the door, he paused long enough to hack - literally hack - up a piece of adamantium.
It landed on the floor in front of him, grisly with pieces of bone and marrow actually stuck to it - oh hi, that was part of his jaw. No wonder it'd been killing him all morning. Bending down, he picked it up and put it in his pocket as he started singing, "Catch a falling star and -- I'm not alone. Huh. Weird. Anakyle Spicewalker. The magical telemetry from the writers' room tells me you're supposed to be here but also I feel like you shouldn't be cause - that's... huh." He stopped talking, pacing toward the little desk. "Aren't we trying to save the trees so we can save ourselves?" He asked, the toe of his boot nudged at the pile of crumpled, shredded papers. Then he saw the yellow post-it and grinned. "Fuck yeah, I forgot - wait, I'm supposed to let you talk."
"I don't want to talk." Kyle looked up into green eyes and endless scars. "Go write sad letters to your crayon penpal, Wade. I have shit to do."
"Don't make me regret foregoing my Douglas-related post-its for you, Anakyle," Wade said, rubbing at his jaw where the ache still sat. He paused, frowned, and then started scratching at his arm. "Goddammit," he muttered, something hard and decidedly recognizable sliding into his voice as he dug his blunt fingernails into the skin along the inside of his forearm. He drew blood - then he drew fascia. Then he drew muscle until he found what he was looking for and dug in hard. "Like fucking Marrow these last few days," he muttered, more to himself than Kyle or anyone else who might be listening as he grasped at something inside the wound he'd created and yanked.
He had to yank three more times before a bloody shard of metal came free. When he looked at Kyle, his eyes were clear even as his blood dripped down his wrist and onto the floor. It spattered all over the paper in front of Kyle as Wade leaned down, one hand braced on the table while the other pointed the thin, bent piece of adamantium right under the younger man's nose. "They took my El- nope, not here. Not even for you. They understand where to apply the leverage now. It's gonna suck. It's gonna suck so hard, Anakyle - and I'm sorry it didn't work on me - see?" He flips the length of adamantium over to show the bone still attached. "Didn't work. Won't ever work. So now you gotta get it and they have the leverage." Leaning in closer, his scarred, pitted nose nearly touching Kyle's, Wade whispers, "They think it makes us weak. Remember that. And use it. Or I will. Either way. Both."
Kyle pushed the papers away from him, stacked them up neatly. "I don't expect to live through it, Wade. I'm just keeping it off Liam." He stood up and took a step towards Wade, and then seemed to think again about whatever he was going to do, and sat back down. "I don't know why they waited so long to spring this shit on us. None of these kids are trained. I don't know what's taking so long."
Wade flipped the shard of adamantium up into the air, reached across the table to smack the back of Kyle's head, and then caught the metal before it could hit the table. "They already know where to apply the pressure, don't make it any easier for them. If I can get through the procedure with my janky HF, you and yours'll be fine. Besides, Daddy Wolvie did it way back when before they even had the plating tech figured out. It's gonna suck, but you'll be fine. I'd be more worried about your brain if I was you, but then I'm always worried about my brain and I live in it."
"I'm not trying to make it easier. It takes time to train people to kill." He wanted to throw up. Kyle figured he'd probably be doing a lot of that - wanting to throw up - if he survived this. "They think it'll take me a couple weeks to recover. That's not fucking around. I healed third degree burns faster." The door irised open again, and two guards stepped in. He considered asking Wade to make sure Jessie took her meds. That Liam ate. That the Frost girls slept.
He shook his head once, cutting himself off before he could ask.
"Fuck. I thought I had more time."
TW: Medical Experimentation, Indoctrination
Anytime he heard the hiss of the doors unlocking, Kyle went still. The tendons in his forearms twitched a little. His neck tensed. He ran inventory on his kids - Liam on his bed reading and eating a microwaved burrito, Jessie throwing darts, Celeste and Mindee watching a DVD.
Four guards this time. Armored, reflective helmets. The doctor who had collected Jessie weekly, Laura once, Kyle himself once to get the last of the bullet fragments out of his leg.
Kyle stood, claws dropped - and slid them back in deliberately. Waited.
"Not to worry, Mister Gibney, we're collecting Mister Nelson for some enhancement."
Liam raised an eyebrow and half sat up. Getting pulled out was never good, no matter who was doing it or why. "No," he started, tail twitching, moving away, further into the cell, "You can't do anything," he protested, knowing it was futile, but refusing to cave. His "training" as they called it was horrible and he wanted nothing to do with it.
"Hey, no, he's not.." Kyle stepped forward a little. "Look, I know, we're trying to train them up, and I'm going -as fast as I can-, but Liam didn't get the same training Laura did. He's like Jessie, he's like Celeste and Mindee. Nobody taught him how to do much more than self-defense." He folded his arms. "You want results, you need to let me fucking teach these kids, and not keep pulling them out to stick them full of needles or electrocute their faces three times a week. " They'd listened about Jessie. They'd fought him a little on the Frost girls. "At least warn me, okay? So I can adapt the lesson plans. What kind of enhancement?"
"Honestly, Mister Gibney. We had that discussion about how you are an educated man, and you can't infer from partial data? Tsk," the doctor clucked. "You have certainly deduced the nature of where you are by now, and I know that you spend time with one of the previous subjects of this particular bit of enhancement. Must I spell out everything for you?"
"Jesus fucking Christ." Kyle snarled and took another step forward, eyes narrowed, counting guards. If he moved fast, he could get two, even with the stun batons. Two more if he could shock Jessie and the Frost girls into helping. Which left the doctor, two more guards, and fuck knew how many more outside. And the wild card. Okay. Re-calibrate. Direct assault was not going to work.
"Do you want to waste the last six weeks of bullshit you've been putting us through? I barely have him benching his body weight. You want him combat capable faster, you give me time.. Are you ... " He looked at Liam. "You keep your ass on that cot. I'm in charge of you and I get to decide when you fucking need enhancement."
Liam curled up at the head of the cot, knees to chin, tail and ears tucked. He hadn't liked any of the 'enhancements' they'd done so far and he shifted on his bottom, taking his weight off automatically, remembering. He didn't know what Kyle thought they were going to do, but whatever it was, he could practically smell the rage with a tinge of fear coming off the older man.
"Even with your weight training and sparring regimens and...other considerations at play, I'm afraid Mister Nelson is likely to only ever be unsuitably...average." The doctor almost managed a paternal expression despite the subject matter and what they had already put Kyle and the others through. "We simply feel we need to...give him an edge. More than one."
It took way too much time to get the growl to stop rising up out of his chest. "Blame your fucking genetics division then, because you assholes made him that way. You want him to be better, go back in time and give him ...." Kyle let out an aggressive snarl. "Oh. Oh, fuck off with this." His eyes tracked over to Jessie and the red patches on her face, over to the Frost girls and the way that they circled each other like two magnets with identical poles, and back to Liam, obediently sitting on his cot. "You are not putting -that shit- into these kids."
The paternal look was replaced by an intense grin. "-There- he is." The doctor tapped at his tablet and cocked his head minutely at Kyle. "And how do you plan to prevent that, Mister Gibney?"
"What, is this some vampire shit, some Obereon and Titania shit, can't do it unless I invite you the fuck in?" Kyle shook his head slowly, took a step forward, watched the guards pull up those bullshit stun batons that hurt like a bitch. "Yeah I'm onto the game here, you're not gonna fuck up your investment by giving the kid with no healing factor that kind of enhancement, are you?"
"Your literary references notwithstanding, I find that these sorts of things tend to work out better when the subject...enters into it with open eyes, having chosen it for themselves." The doctor shrugged minutely. "More or less. The minutiae of informed consent in experimentation will have to be argued by others who are not so busy doing actual work."
~Remember,~ a ghostly voice echoed in the back of Kyle's head, ~you said you would do anything to keep them safe.~
The little tendons in Kyle's next twitched as he kept himself from whirling around to snarl at whichever of the Frost girls had said that. He inhaled and exhaled over and over, grounding himself in the rise and fall of his own chest. The fuckers could be patient, this was a setup anyway. "I need time to revise their training plans for my recovery period."
The doctor paged through several items on his tablet. "We can stretch recovery as long as four weeks if needed," he declared. "Revise the training accordingly, and your...proteges will be kept to the curriculum you designate."
"Four?" Fuck, he'd expected a generous two. How the fuck long did it take Logan to recover? It'd been days, right? "I'm writing lesson plans for six weeks. Do not fuck around with them, and don't send in a sub. " Kyle fought down the surge of bile in his mouth, the prickle of cold sweat on his lower back, the soothing warmth of ~You're taking care of your pack~ in the back of his head, in that same eerie rot-sweet mental voice. "they'll keep to it. They're good kids." They're good kids. They're -good- kids. Kids. He was letting them be kids as long as they could be.
"You have until the end of the day, Mister Gibney." The doctor took a sip from a coffee mug and turned toward the door. "We'll schedule the procedure for the first thing tomorrow morning. I recommend avoiding breakfast. We've found that there are less issues with the adamantium bonding on an empty stomach."
Kyle writes up his lesson plans for while he’ll be out, and has a…semi-philosophical conversation with the other captive adult in the facility.
TW: Medical Experimentation, Indoctrination, Gore, Self-Harm, Mental Illness, Suicidal Ideation
Six weeks. Paper and pen lesson plans. Paper and fucking felt tip pen. Kyle let his head hang low as he sat at the desk he'd been provided. Every little moment he wrung out of this was another hour closer to
His pen moved over the papers. Careful big block letters, ink smearing on the meat of his hand. His handwriting - already bad - was worse with fatigue and grief. His hands didn't shake. He still rent paper and threw it over the edge of the desk, started another list. He peeled a yellow post-it note off the next paper, and rolled his eyes. [watch What We Do in the Shadows eat snacks fanboy Wesley Snipes] was not in the lesson plan. He'd built in recreation time. Rest. Fuck, Liam had a line item for physical contact. Kidnapper-mandated-cuddle-time, what the fuck.
Another thing he did not have time to question.
Of course they didn't have any fucking clocks. He'd been measuring time with DVDs. Long documentaries from the history channel that he didn't need to pay attention to. Bridgerton. Game of Thrones. Anything long and boring he could ignore in the background but measure time by.
The door irised open. Maybe an hour early? Measuring time by DVD was not entirely accurate.
So far in his long and storied career - okay, like twelve? ish? thirteen? years? - the worst experiences had all happened offscreen except for the whole 'baby HF needs daddy to bleed' ocean-surf-in-his-eye one... and for the most part, he was pretty grateful to just have to wash up in a hospital bed and have yoghurt funneled down his throat. Except for this time. This time he was spitting... shards? Not nails, he wasn't a carpenter or a painter or anything, so no spitting nails. As he walked through the door, he paused long enough to hack - literally hack - up a piece of adamantium.
It landed on the floor in front of him, grisly with pieces of bone and marrow actually stuck to it - oh hi, that was part of his jaw. No wonder it'd been killing him all morning. Bending down, he picked it up and put it in his pocket as he started singing, "Catch a falling star and -- I'm not alone. Huh. Weird. Anakyle Spicewalker. The magical telemetry from the writers' room tells me you're supposed to be here but also I feel like you shouldn't be cause - that's... huh." He stopped talking, pacing toward the little desk. "Aren't we trying to save the trees so we can save ourselves?" He asked, the toe of his boot nudged at the pile of crumpled, shredded papers. Then he saw the yellow post-it and grinned. "Fuck yeah, I forgot - wait, I'm supposed to let you talk."
"I don't want to talk." Kyle looked up into green eyes and endless scars. "Go write sad letters to your crayon penpal, Wade. I have shit to do."
"Don't make me regret foregoing my Douglas-related post-its for you, Anakyle," Wade said, rubbing at his jaw where the ache still sat. He paused, frowned, and then started scratching at his arm. "Goddammit," he muttered, something hard and decidedly recognizable sliding into his voice as he dug his blunt fingernails into the skin along the inside of his forearm. He drew blood - then he drew fascia. Then he drew muscle until he found what he was looking for and dug in hard. "Like fucking Marrow these last few days," he muttered, more to himself than Kyle or anyone else who might be listening as he grasped at something inside the wound he'd created and yanked.
He had to yank three more times before a bloody shard of metal came free. When he looked at Kyle, his eyes were clear even as his blood dripped down his wrist and onto the floor. It spattered all over the paper in front of Kyle as Wade leaned down, one hand braced on the table while the other pointed the thin, bent piece of adamantium right under the younger man's nose. "They took my El- nope, not here. Not even for you. They understand where to apply the leverage now. It's gonna suck. It's gonna suck so hard, Anakyle - and I'm sorry it didn't work on me - see?" He flips the length of adamantium over to show the bone still attached. "Didn't work. Won't ever work. So now you gotta get it and they have the leverage." Leaning in closer, his scarred, pitted nose nearly touching Kyle's, Wade whispers, "They think it makes us weak. Remember that. And use it. Or I will. Either way. Both."
Kyle pushed the papers away from him, stacked them up neatly. "I don't expect to live through it, Wade. I'm just keeping it off Liam." He stood up and took a step towards Wade, and then seemed to think again about whatever he was going to do, and sat back down. "I don't know why they waited so long to spring this shit on us. None of these kids are trained. I don't know what's taking so long."
Wade flipped the shard of adamantium up into the air, reached across the table to smack the back of Kyle's head, and then caught the metal before it could hit the table. "They already know where to apply the pressure, don't make it any easier for them. If I can get through the procedure with my janky HF, you and yours'll be fine. Besides, Daddy Wolvie did it way back when before they even had the plating tech figured out. It's gonna suck, but you'll be fine. I'd be more worried about your brain if I was you, but then I'm always worried about my brain and I live in it."
"I'm not trying to make it easier. It takes time to train people to kill." He wanted to throw up. Kyle figured he'd probably be doing a lot of that - wanting to throw up - if he survived this. "They think it'll take me a couple weeks to recover. That's not fucking around. I healed third degree burns faster." The door irised open again, and two guards stepped in. He considered asking Wade to make sure Jessie took her meds. That Liam ate. That the Frost girls slept.
He shook his head once, cutting himself off before he could ask.
"Fuck. I thought I had more time."
