Grab Your Horses and Your Guns [FANFIC]
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Hey folks, it’s the Void Crew fanfic I’ve been brainstorming!
Here’s a link to AO3 for the folks who have accounts! https://archiveofourown.org/works/67120822/chapters/173316520
Summary: Blade, Gambit, Elektra, and Johnny Storm end up on Deadpool’s world after something called a buwaya brought a storm and tried to eat their souls. Luckily, Deadpool’s heard about a Filipino rain-goddess called Anitun Tabu, and if anyone can help with magical storms from magical crocodiles, it’s her! So he talks to a guy, who talks to a guy… annnnnnnnd most Filipinos in New York are artists, athletes, or Catholic, so they don’t know much more about this chick. Where else should they go but California, a state with a famously large Fil-American population?
Deadpool ends up kidnapping a mutant called Ivy Ilaw, and his companions are… less than pleased to find out that they’ve suddenly become accessories to three crimes. Even worse, Ivy has a history of getting kidnapped, since her response when meeting an armed Deadpool at work was to chug some beer and fight him.
Anitun Tabu soon forces Deadpool to make amends: Take down the mutant-hunters who kidnapped Ivy the first time, and THEN she'll help his friends get home. But maybe the friendship they needed was kidnapping a waitress and stealing her car for a forced road trip!
—
On a cold day in February, clouds roll in on many worlds, centering on all the different versions of New York City. The rain starts soft enough, but by evening it’s a downpour, relentless and unsuited for not-quite-spring. Residents are unsettled, but most think it’s a cold snap.
One man, with his bones coated in metal and more of them used as weapons, starts to ache in a way he hasn’t felt in a long, long time.
One man, so riddled with sickness that it makes him immortal, gets feverish and goes off his food.
--
“Fucking hell, it’s been raining for three days!” Wade Wilson, bald and scarred, staggers back into bed from the bathroom. He flops back under the covers, with a near-hairless dog snuffling on top of them. “When is it gonna stop?”
As the only tuft of fur on her head grazes his exposed arm, Mary Puppins’ tongue pokes out of her cheek and slobbers on his burning wrist a few times. Wade never quite gets used to how weird his dog looks, but he’s her dear papa now, and he must love his ugly little creature for who she is.
Besides, it’s not like he looks any better.
“Don’t worry about your papa, Mary Puppins,” he rasps. “The super-cancer is acting up. I think I just need to get stabbed a few times to get my mojo back.”
On the sofa in the corner, a graying brunette called Logan Howlett groans. “Find someone else for that, bub. I’m not feeling so good myself.”
“Nobody’s stabbing anyone, Dad.” A short teenage girl with long dark hair comes in from the kitchen, carrying two mugs of warmed-up soup from the kitchen. “Not before you get some fluids, at least.”
One mug goes to Logan; he chugs it like a pint of beer. “Thanks, Laura.”
The second goes to Wade, who’s still shivering enough to shake a few spoonfuls onto the blanket. When the heat starts to sink into his palm, he feels steady enough to take a few sips. “Thank you.”
“Huh. You’re both feeling bad?” The taps from Blind Al’s cane let them know when she comes in from her room. “That’s what happens with climate change. We got half the year’s rain in February. Unnatural shit.” She shakes her head and leaves, with a handful of more taps along the floor.
Halfway through the mug of soup, Wade’s stomach starts to protest, so he puts it on the table for now.
In his mind’s eye, past the fourth wall of the media, he can see a short and tanned woman with Ray-Ban glasses. She’s most likely Asian, but he doesn’t know which kind, so he’ll just keep quiet until she says something about it.
She’s minding her own business, typing on her laptop or fiddling with a thick black braid to her waist… until she must feel someone looking at her as well, and she spots him on the other side. “Wait… Deadpool?”
“Shiiiiiiit!” Wade’s head swivels to face her (somewhere by the wall?), and he grins from ear to ear. “An out-of-season storm? And Logan and I are sick?! We’re in a fanfic, boys and girls! Oh, gentle artist, are we gonna be a slow-burn or hurt-comfort? But we didn’t get hurt yet, so you probably need a few chapters to set everything up.”
“Fuck, I forgot the genre!” The woman winces and checks the clock: It’s midnight. “Okay, I wasn’t focusing on relationship-relationships for this piece. The only hard rule is that there’s no love triangles, because I hate that shit. You and Vanessa? Great. You and Logan? Also great. They give you different things.”
“A threesome?! In a DISNEY work, Madam?!” Deadpool presses a hand to his chest in mock horror. “How risque!”
“Fuck it all,” Logan gripes, and he covers his head with a pillow. “He’s healthy enough to read. Wade, I don’t care whether you read nerd shit or not, but you gotta sleep at some point!”
“Honestly, it’s not risque. I’m not good at sex scenes, so nobody’s getting on-screen action here.”
“Everyone should know their limits! This is comic books, not ghostwriting!” Deadpool assures her. “And wise you are to hide the naked times, for Disney is a jealous god! But what plot are we in, wise artist, if not a lemon?!”
“I don’t know, this is a road trip,” she admits. “I wrote this because Channing Tatum’s Gambit is a national treasure, and I need the Void Crew to fight more.”
“Violence! A girl after my own heart!” Wade grins.
“Wade! Turn your damn phone off before sunset!” Logan stomps over to the bed, yanks Deadpool’s phone off the table, and stuffs it in his pocket, with the floor shaking under his feet. “Even if you don’t sleep, everyone else needs a break from your mouth!”
“A curfew?! For Marvel Jesus?!” He insists. “If you weren’t so pretty, I’d be--”
SNIKT.
Logan’s claws are pretty good at shutting Wade’s mouth for him.
--
Over the next few days is the slow ride away from what they tend to call their “mutant flare-ups:” Vomiting, arguments, and whenever Logan loses his shit and hits Wade for talking so much, they end up needing to heal up for about a day.
To be honest, Vanessa and Laura find it reassuring when the fighting gets longer than one or two sloppy hits each. It means they’re both recovering, after all. Of course, Wade is also recovering enough to talk more about fanfiction and plot-twists.
“Is Wade bi or what?” Logan asks Vanessa one day as she helps with the laundry. “I swear to God, he talked about the Cajun guy this week as much as he talks about you.”
It’s hard for Logan to remember that the man in the Void was Gambit. He had the coat and the funky costume, but all the different details made Logan feel like he was tossed around on a ship: Cajun Guy’s eyes were so damn blue and normal that they felt weird after the red-and-black eyes that Logan’s Gambit had. Cajun Guy had a motor-mouth to rival Wade, and he was more hot-blooded to match the flashy moves. Cajun Guy didn’t have a beard, either, and he was probably twice the weight that Logan’s Gambit used to be.
Only the cards were the same, and Logan’s Gambit mostly threw them like grenades--he had to do his own card tricks instead of having them float around. No purple glitter when they charged up, either.
“It’s not a sex thing,” Vanessa tells him. “Keep an eye out. When Wade starts talking like he’s in a movie, something’s up. Or rather, in a fanfiction.”
“His power isn’t storytelling, though.” Logan starts folding clothes after he takes them out of the dryer, ignoring the stings from too-hot zippers or buttons. “It’s not dying.”
“But after he got experimented on, things happen around him now.” Vanessa checks the soap and pours it into the washer full of clothes. “He’s not just paranoid.”
“Do we have a metaphor, dear Vanessa?!” Wade comes in, grinning. His scarred skin is still waxy, and to Logan he smells stale, since he hasn’t changed clothes since the storm started--but he started eating on his own willpower again, and Logan can smell less of the fever reek than he did before. “The ‘X-Men as mental-illness’ comparison, perhaps?!”
“Wade, whatever happens with the Gambit guy, please keep the gunfire as far as you can,” Vanessa tells him. “If I move back in, I’m not cleaning up blood any more than I have to.”
--
In another world, where the rain pours down on a version of Los Angeles, the man they call Blade feels a wave of magic in the water.
An older Black man with gray streaks in his hair and beard, Eric Brooks isn’t notable at first: His black leather coat is well-worn and blends right in with the folks prepared for rain, though the flashes of blood-red lining are for a much younger man, and people might wonder how many years he’s had it.
If someone knew how to look, there are weapons tucked away all over his body.
“Aswang,” says a woman’s voice, as the sky cracks blue from lightning.
Blade takes his phone out and puts it to his ear.
“Hello. Who’s asking?” Blade checks his weapons with his free hand and settles on a leaf-shaped sword strapped to his leg: Slender but sharp, and wave-tempered. It has no silver, for Filipino spirits are not weak to that; but nestled into the handle is a stingray’s tail barb. Wrapped in sharkskin, it’s a bit too long for the handle, so the last inch or two of bone is nestled white against the base of the blade. “I’m not an aswang, Tita, but I’ve had to deal with a few of them. Any trouble you need help with?”
“Do you not drink the blood of mortals?” The Filipino points out. “That makes you an aswang.”
“I try not to, Tita,” Blade says with a frown. After all these years, he still can’t avoid that telltale stinging when other spirits call him all those different names for vampire. “Anyway, what’s wrong?”
“There’s something in the water,” the woman tells him. “Get inside when you can.”
“It’s rain, not Loch Ness,” Blade says. “About five times the normal rain this far south, but I won’t die from getting wet--”
In his mind’s eye, where the spirits talk to him, something big and scaly roars.
SOULS! The creature howls. HUMAN SOULS!
“Thanks for the warning, Tita!” Blade sticks his phone in his pocket and starts running.
Everything in his head starts screaming from the memories of Alioth, that living storm-cloud in the Void between worlds.
“That’s a buwaya!” The woman tells him as he bolts.
“Why does he want souls, Tita?” Blade vaults over a fence, but his knees and ankles protest when he lands too hard and stumbles.
He’s not young anymore, he’s forced to remember. He can ignore the gray streaks in his hair, or the rough edges of his voice after a hard day, but not when his joints don’t like something.
“The buwaya eat them,” she says. “When they eat people, their soul is taken as well.”
“And you all swim in the Philippines?” Blade detours into an alley, heedless of rusted trashcans or scattered litter.
He learned something about crocodiles today. Either they’ve got a lot more juice in the Philippines than in other countries, or something else borrowed their name.
A lot of spirits are called something else in the spirit-world, either because they’re connected or because they’re close enough. You gotta hear how a person’s mouth wraps around crocodile, or if they flinch like something is listening.
As a clump of people spot Blade running back out into the streets, thinking he just got caught unawares, their chuckles or grins die off as lightning flashes.
“Could you tell him I’m not quite human, Tita?!” Another reminder that he’s old; when he was younger, he wasn’t dumb enough to fight things this big without a reason, but he definitely didn’t used to cut deals with the spirits. “I might mess with his stomach!”
“If you fit in his mouth, he doesn’t care,” the woman says to him. “Get inside as fast as you can.”
The ground shakes with the footfalls of a massive beast, breaking the concrete with its weight.
Water starts to skim off an invisible silhouette, the size of a bus with spikes along its back, but Blade doesn’t know if the buwaya is shaking off the water or if it’s just made of water.
Long watery teeth start to form in a long and wedge-shaped mouth.
“Yep, he got a big mouth.”
SOULLLLLLLLLLLLS! The buwaya screeches. HUMAN! SOULS!
“Can he say anything else?!” Blade hates language barriers. What if the buwaya’s actually speaking Tagalog? He’s not much good at it, and there’s only so much that being half-vampire can help with.
“Not much. This kind of buwaya is as good as a beast,” the woman says. “They can’t speak mortal tongues, unless someone can speak to animals. They are spirits of the wilds, uncaring of mortals. Apart from their hunger, that is.”
“There’s different kinds?!”
Cars are screeching away from the watery dragon, and the people on foot follow suit.
“Get inside, aswang!” The woman orders. “A buwaya like this can sink a ship full of men, but he cannot hunt prey he can’t see!”
“I can’t let it eat people!” He stops running, and the leaf-shaped sword jumps out from its sheath.
“I know you ain’t fighting no dragons today!” A thick-accented Cajun voice is his only warning before Blade’s dragged into the nearest warehouse by two people. “Just making off like goddamn Saint George, ain’t you? That thing is made of water, Blade, I don’t think you can cut it with no knives we got up in here!”
When they stop and the door’s shut and locked, Blade can see two brunettes: A tall and muscular man in a black cowl and a pale brown trench-coat, and a woman with green eyes and two sais at her hips. They’re about as wet as he is, but he’ll take the company while they dry out.
“Gambit. And Elektra?” He grins. Most of Blade is glad to see them… But they shouldn’t be in Blade’s world. What if they’re about to get thrown in the Void again? Did those Time Agent folks send the creature over? “Nice reunion, you two.”
He relaxes and sheathes his sword. He almost jumps to hear the clack when it falls back in place, with the quiet making his ears ring.
“Wait a minute.”
Outside was full of screaming. Outside had broken pavement. Outside had noise: The rain, and the wind, and the crunch of huge claws on concrete.
But inside? It’s as quiet as a graveyard, with only the drumming rain to let anyone know what’s happening on the next block.
“Is this place magic?” Blade peers out the window, but Gambit and Elektra both shove their hands over the frame, with the telltale white knuckles of fear.
“Don’t open nothing while he’s this close,” Gambit warns him. “Tick-Tock came to our worlds and tried to chomp on us, but he as bright as a regular gator; all he talks about is dinner.”
“If you’re in practically any place with four walls and a door, it’s as good as magic for him,” Elektra confirms. “We just had to keep taking breaks and running to any building we could lock up.”
“Yep, that’s civilization,” Blade muses. Buildings, music, bread, all sorts of man-made things can ward off ‘spirits of the wild.’ “The spirits said I need to get indoors, too. Said he’s Filipino, and he eats souls AND people.”
“And that’s barely helpful,” Elektra huffs. “If we try to find any Filipinos on foot, we’re going to run into him!”
“Well, we got something in case he does.” Blade takes out his leaf-shaped sword again. “Most Pinoy spirits don’t like stingrays. Or this.” He digs in his pocket and brings out a chunk of rocky glass that looks like a glittering tree’s root, with a leather cord looped through some holes drilled in the middle. “Which one wants to borrow it?”
“Ain’t Tick-Tock the one bringing lightning?” Gambit, strangely enough, steps back and shivers for the first time. “Too much juice in that gris-gris for my liking.”
Blade doesn’t tell anyone what a pangil ng kidlat is right away. In the spirit-world, the lightning fang is shock-blue and it runs as hot as what made it. Regular Filipinos always suspect that it’s an agimat; and Pinoys with magic know it right away. How exactly do mutants fit in?
“Looks like I’ll try it out.” Elektra puts it on her neck. “But yeah, let’s take a breather first.”
--
Blade and Elektra had been the first to meet up in the Void; for Blade it had been a week after getting dropped off by Time Agents. For Elektra, it was about a month.
Luckily, they hadn’t done anything stupid like fighting. They were both too old for that kind of thing.
They’d kept at swords’ length from each other, and then Elektra had used telepathy to get into his head, with that telltale push of her trying to influence his mind.
“I’m not risking being on the wrong end of that,” Blade had declared, sheathing his sword. “Nice to meet you. People call me Blade.”
“Oh, thank god.” She put her own weapons away. “I’m Elektra.”
Elektra had already been wearing a belt with a dead man’s scent when Blade met her, only saying that Cassandra Nova’s men killed him. He didn’t like to pry about Matt Murdock too much.
--
Johnny Storm had acted like he was eternally twenty-five years old. His heart was in the right place with heroics, sure, but his head was not.
Elektra and Blade had found him flying a space shuttle running from Time Agents, as most people did in the Void. What most people weren’t doing was hearing someone on the radio scream at him to get the fuck back home.
“Johnny, this place is a metaphysical junkyard! Anything useless goes there before it gets annihilated forever! AND YOU WENT FOR A DAMN JOYRIDE?!” Another man was yelling. “Those guys on your tail are Time Agents! THEY DO NOT LIKE US!”
Then the shuttle got wrecked, to Johnny’s dismay until seeing Elektra… and went back to dismay again, after he saw Blade and one of his trusty swords.
Thanks to space-and-time weirdness, Johnny had apparently spent a year INSIDE the Void, but his sister and brother-in-law said it was only a couple of weeks back home.
“So it’s like time dilation, only here instead of space,” Johnny had mused, but anything else he could tell them about space was delayed after they ran into some zombies… and he’d lit himself on fire. “FLAME ON, MOTHERFUCKERS!”
--
They’d found Gambit wandering around the dregs of a washed-up pier with a silver staff on his back.
Everyone had gotten used to people walking around in funky neon outfits over the past few weeks (Johnny’s navy bodysuit was downright tame), so a mostly regular brown trenchcoat (even if the popped collar from the 1980s looked like it was on steroids), a black cowl, silver boots, and what looked like a purple breastplate was essentially business as usual.
The stranger was as tall as Johnny, but his arms and legs were a lot thicker, and that breastplate would have fallen right off Johnny if he’d tried it on.
Elektra couldn’t see his thoughts; she said there was only a constant hum.
“Someone here be sneaking around,” the man in the trenchcoat grinned, and his mouth started running a mile a minute while Johnny and Elektra winced at how thick his accent was. “Whoever it is, my head don’t like telepaths for some reason. I be walking right by them and all they hear is static.” He made a chhhhhhh noise to mimic a TV or phone having trouble. “Tell you right now, if Charles Xavier can’t hear me, I don’t think none of you lightweights here can.”
“Fuckkkkkk, he’s Cajun,” Johnny groaned under his breath.
“Jesus,” Elektra had whispered to Blade as well. “I only heard about half of that, but he knows Charles Xavier, so he might be a mutant.”
“He ain’t that bad, y’all are just from New York.” Blade chuckled. “My turn.”
Blade soon regretted making that jab.
He couldn’t tell much about the Cajun from his scent, only that he was “an adult with no health problems.” Hollywood liked to think werewolves and vampires’ noses were like scanning someone’s medical records, but there was only so much you could tell about someone between puberty and old age, and that was a long time. Sure, there were thirty-year-olds who looked like this man, but there were also sixty-year-olds who refused to understand the concept of time.
The Cajun also had the scent of “a different brand of human,” so with him knowing about psychic powers, he was either magic, or he had that mutant gene like Sabretooth and Cassandra Nova.
“Well… he’s healthy, he’s a mutant, and if he’s that muscled, he’s somewhere between thirty and fifty years old,” he’d admitted, to Johnny’s glee.
“We saw most of that shit already, Daywalker,” Johnny said with a joking shove. “Do you know if the getup is magical?”
“Nah, just looks like motorcycle gear--”
“Heyyyyy, there’s more of y’all!” The Cajun laughed, and almost before they could see him whip out his staff, he pole-vaulted over the boards to their spot. “Tell the rest of the class what you talking about, bon amis!”
“OH SHIT!” Blade blocked the Cajun’s staff with the flat of his sword, but instead of trying to lock weapons, the Cajun just slid his staff away and cartwheeled up onto the roof of a shed, leaving the three of them baffled as to why--until Blade remembered that ranged fighters liked to get the high ground.
“Hey,” Blade told him, and he sheathed his sword. “If you got any guns in that coat, I’d appreciate if you didn’t use them on us.”
“Depends on whether you got any buddies hiding out where I can’t see,” the Cajun retorted. “Now, I won’t harm nobody, but I ain’t coming down yet.”
“Can’t hit me if I just burn everything! Flame on!” Johnny lit up and flew to the same height.
The Cajun just laughed again--not mocking, but joyful, and his blue eyes almost turned red in Johnny’s flames. “Now, ain’t you an angel coming down for vengeance? You a mutant?”
“If it counts, I went on a NASA mission and I didn’t come home right.”
The three of them had learned in the Void that mutants often asked if someone else with powers was a mutant; Blade and Elektra got a fair few questions, but Johnny with his literal firepower was especially prone to being mistaken for one.
“Where did you even learn how to fight, Swamp Boy?” Johnny wondered. “The circus?”
“Johnny, don’t test him,” Blade warned. He didn’t want to fight any circus folks who ended up here. The regular ones threw knives, and they were paid to MISS.
But he had a point. Most fighters climbed or jumped, but a dancer who learned to fight would cartwheel. Blade could do it when he was younger, but it started to make him queasy a few years ago, so he’d had to cut back on it.
Dancers picked up fighting fast, but they didn’t think like fighters. They had different body-awareness, different senses of space or threat, different everything.
And Blade hated dealing with them.
The Cajun’s hands didn’t look much like a fighter’s, either, as muscled as they were-- strong was different from fighting. All that skin exposed from his shooting gloves was clear, soft, and pretty. Blade didn’t want to get hit by anyone that big, but the Cajun wouldn’t specialize in melee with those hands.
And now he don’t need to punch us up close! All his training warned him.
An even worse possibility flickered into Blade’s head: What if the Cajun knew capoeira, that unholy lovechild of dancing and fighting? Elektra and Blade did not.
“Look,” Elektra put one of her sais away. “Let’s settle down. We’re here because some guys in weird SWAT armor arrested us and dropped us off, and we’re just trying to get home. What about you?”
“The Time Variance Authority. Don’t much like them.” The Cajun didn’t get off the roof, but his scent mellowed out. “Y’all know a way out of here?”
“No, but Cassandra Nova does.”
“Charles’ sister?”
“If you know Charles Xavier, are you a mutant?” Blade wondered.
“I been running around with Charles for a while now,” he said before he dove off the shed, rolling to break his fall, and he popped back up as fluid as water. “The name’s Remy LeBeau. You wanna see what I got up in this coat?”
He pulled out a deck of cards, shuffled it a bit… and then Blade smelled a jolt of power in those strong-but-soft hands.
So the top card of the deck lit up with purple light, and he tossed it into the shed: It pulsed a few times before it blew a hole in the wall, smearing purple all over the wound.
“MOTHERFUCKER!” Johnny nearly fell as the blast throttled their ears.
The Cajun laughed for the last time, head back and mouth open. “They call me the Gambit, sha!”
--
Back in the warehouse, in Blade’s version of Los Angeles, they are still tired and wet.
“I haven’t sprinted this much in ten years.” Elektra flops onto a box.
“Get some stretching into your workout, sha.” With that, Gambit sinks into a front split--not falling, because that implies a lack of control--and Elektra groans.
“Be glad your knees still work like that, Remy.” She starts a more moderate bend, and her joints crackle. “Oh, that hurts.”
“I got a while before I start sounding like popcorn on movie night.” Gambit grins and rolls up into a handstand with the same smoothness. “Why does everyone think you do the splits like you kicking a door in? Gonna break those nice legs of yours with all that fuss. You use your hamstrings.”
“Stop rubbing in how you can still do that topsy-turvy shit without feeling sick,” Blade snaps, and Gambit grins.
“You an awful grumpy haint today, Eric. I ain’t never heard you talk so much as you did now.”
“A man gets tired of holding shit in after twenty years.” But he smiles back to remember the mistake Gambit made.
--
Gambit was their very first enigma. He liked to joke about his age and claim he was nineteen or eighty as the punchline needed, but if he’d been in high school when iPods came to start replacing CDs, he was at least in his late twenties.
He was also too canny in a fight to be that much younger than everyone else, and if Gambit found out that two or three cards wouldn’t deal with an opponent, he’d find a backup plan (which few young men would want to do).
Gambit, for all his cheries and ma belles, knew well enough not to act on those words with Elektra, and not just because she might stab him.
He had a wife once, too, Bella Donna from New Orleans, and he wasn’t sure if he could marry someone again. This was not the overwrought grief of a twenty-year-old on their first or second real relationship; Remy smelled hurt whenever he talked about her, the same way Elektra smelled when she took off Matt Murdock’s belt in the mornings or evenings.
Elektra hurt more when it rained. There were no seasons in this place, so rain came and went as it pleased. Something-- someone --would make her go outside, without a coat or umbrella or any makeshift version of them. She’d look straight up to the clouds, the salt tears mixing with freshwater.
“Who she talking to out there?” Gambit asked in a hushed tone.
Elektra couldn’t hear them… but Matt Murdock might.
That was another sign that made Blade wonder exactly how old Gambit was. Most young folks didn’t believe in ghosts, or they didn’t respect them, or they were too self-conscious to talk about them in front of the living.
“He’s Matt,” Blade said.
“Now, what in God’s name would possess Matt to leave a woman like her?”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” Johnny said. “She came here with him, and then he died.”
“Hmm.” Gambit shook his head, and the sigh came from the depths of his chest.
That day, Elektra’s thoughts had been so loud that Blade heard them without even trying.
“It’s like I can see again,” said a young man’s voice. (Was he twenty years old? Thirty? Blade couldn’t tell anymore, and that irritated him.)
So the rain fell, and they waited for the ghost of Matt Murdock to let go of Elektra.
She never stayed too long. With so little clothing options in the Void, you had to be careful letting your gear get rained on, and she came back inside when her hair was flattened, but not much else.
“Gonna catch a cold if you stay out there, sha.” Gambit made a show of taking off his coat for her, and sometimes it was still strange to see how dark the rest of his suit was, with black sleeves and the unhidden purple breastplate.
“I’m fine,” she’d said through her teeth. Elektra said this a lot, but she still smelled of grief, dripping with it like the water from her hair, and she looked about as happy as a wet cat.
“I hear you been talking to a boy called Matt,” Gambit smiled at her. “You think he likes liquor?”
“Remy, Matt was a lawyer!” Elektra was shocked enough to laugh. “They tend to follow the rules, not break them.”
“This ain’t prohibition, sha!” Gambit declared. “I’ll find something for him. If he don’t like it, he don’t gotta drink it. More for me.”
Elektra and Johnny had both gently laughed this off as Cajun ghost stories, or corrupting a lawyer (New Yorkers, both of them), but Blade grew up in Los Angeles, where the dead walked along trails of flame-colored flowers, and they gathered unseen around their living relatives every year.
Spirits didn’t seem to care whether vampires were living or dead, with so many cultures wandering the United States. Some vampires were alive and others were walking corpses, but they and other spirits paid a lot more attention to the ‘drinking blood’ part of vampirism--no surprise, since blood was so damn magical.
And so Blade would often get called a spirit by other spirits, especially if they didn’t know English.
On the Day of the Dead, if Blade ventured out for vampire-hunting, the food left for the ancestors had an odd way of making him feel hungry, in a way that the food for the living never did.
The air would be full of the scents of marigolds and food on the ofrendas--or what seemed like the essence of the food.
Pan de muerto didn’t smell like the bread from the grocery store, even if the living reacted the same way to it; on the Day of the Dead, he’d also see children helping to mix dough, and learning to shape it with too-small hands. The oranges they used would cut through the smell wafting from the memory-of-ovens, sweet and lighter than air.
The dead often smiled and waved him over, but he’d just shake his head and say ‘gracias.’ These were family offerings--he didn’t feel right trying to eat them.
--
One day, Gambit left out a glass of scavenged cider on the kitchen table, poured from a cracked and half-empty jug.
The mug that Gambit was drinking just smelled like itself: Fermented fruit, the sting of alcohol, and the doughy remnants of yeast. Even the living needed to learn how to like alcohol, with so many adults pulling pranks on their kids with sips that made them pucker or gag.
But the glass of cloudy dark amber on the table smelled like apples, clear and sweet, with the crunch of wet bites. Blade saw people guzzle it down with hazy laughter, and phantom juice dripped off his chin.
Gambit was wary, but not surprised to see Blade, his bare hands turning pale over the handle.
“Oh, Eric. Are you a haint?” he’d asked. “If I expected anyone sneaking over for free drinks, it’d be Johnny. You ain’t eaten nothing since I joined y’all, but now you here for a dead man’s glass.”
“I’m not dead. At least, my kind of vampire isn’t.” He took a seat on the other side. “My mother got bit by a vampire when she was pregnant. Had some side-effects when I was born.”
“Hmm. You ain’t bitten none of us yet, so I’m good for now,” Gambit said. “You see that Matt boy?”
“He’s with Elektra.” That wasn’t quite the truth. Blade couldn’t always see or hear ghosts like proper spirits, but he knew when they were around. Matt Murdock’s presence had always been there in the early days, ebbing and flowing wherever Elektra was, and he’d take a while to leave.
“What do things smell like to you, Monsieur Haint?” Gambit wondered. “You got a strong nose when you be tracking folks down, but you don’t feel any kind of way towards much--food, cologne, nothing. Except a dumpster, but nobody likes those.”
“It’s a magical thing.” Blade pointed to Gambit’s half-empty mug. “Your drink just smells normal. Mashed fruit, yeast, alcohol.” Then, to the glass of dark brown: “That: It smells like apples. I see people eating them, people getting drunk. I think it’s what people feel when they drink cider.”
“If Matt don’t like it, you want some?” Gambit drained the rest of his mug and stuck it in the sink. “It ain’t bubbly enough for me, but it’s good otherwise.”
“I don’t know if I can even get drunk,” Blade admitted. “I already don’t want to eat food.”
“First time for everything, Haint.” Gambit smiled at him: Not one of his wide-eyed battle grins, like he’s already feeling the blood pump (and that man sure loves a fight), or the self-assured charming smiles that he gives to Elektra or other women. It was smaller and softer, filtering across the table like sunlight through trees.
He is some kind of performer, Blade thought, and he wondered if Gambit used to be an actor. Actors danced and dancers acted, after all.
Folks thought actors just played dress-up or that they lied, and even actors might say that kind of thing in interviews. Maybe they were being modest, maybe they knew regular folks might not get the craft of acting, or maybe they didn’t even know what they were really doing--but Blade lived in LA, where EVERYONE wanted to get into show business. He heard the discussions when films were shooting or scripts were being read. And what actors did, they studied people and they studied the spaces and distance and things that people dealt with, and they figured out how to smile across the table at someone who was doing something for the first time.
So Blade picked the glass up, hesitant at first. It was so much darker than the other ciders he’s seen; it looked almost like stout beer, and he’d been expecting something sour and gritty.
But it was sweet without being cloying, and something warmed his chest up and spread like water.
People said good soup or coffee felt like this.
“You ever talk to a real haint, Eric?” Gambit wondered again. “Like Matt?”
“Ghosts ain’t always like living spirits,” Blade admitted, sipping again. “With talking and roaming around. Maybe I ain’t specialized enough for that, or maybe I ain’t met the right kind of ghost. I hear Matt’s memories, usually. And how Elektra knew him. They were young then.”
--
Back in LA, in the warehouse where the rain falls and a creature from across the ocean stalks the streets, Blade is still--still--tired. Not exhausted anymore, but he’s still breathing hard and his knees still hurt, and he thinks with a lot of swearing that he is old.
Remy, for all his literal flexing, isn’t too quick to start running yet. Perhaps he’s just being smart (kind?), because it wouldn’t be a good idea to meet up with your old crew and then ditch them again.
Plus the warehouse is their main protection right now, and they don’t know how long it will take to find another place to break in (and lock right back up).
--
In the Void, Elektra was still fine as hell, but with the memories of Matt came the memories of herself, and the woman used to wear what looked like a corset and stilettos. To fight, not to model.
As her grief eased and Matt’s presence slowly left, she’d caught Blade accidentally wandering a memory of hers one morning.
“I didn’t mean to,” he’d told her as she cooked an omelet and brewed coffee. “Sometimes you still think about him. And… then I see you, from back then.”
She nodded over her coffee. “You’re three kids too late for the heels, though,” she’d declared. “I prefer to stab enemies now, not my own feet.”
“Any thoughts on the leather pants?” Blade quipped.
She chuckled and started eating her omelet from the pan; in the Void, kitchen stuff was hard to come by, so the polite rules of eating had long been abandoned by the humans. “If you’re okay with waiting an hour for me to get back in there, sure.”
“You telling me you GAINED weight? Goddamn.”
Then she’d laughed--but at herself, not him. “I’m telling you that if I could barely get into my own pants, everyone else needs to sign a waiting list,” she admitted. “Those things didn’t behave if I looked at them wrong.”
“And you still wore them?” He put his face in his hands. “Young folks don’t deserve their joints or their fitness or none of that shit. ‘I’m Elektra Natchios,’” he mimicked. “‘It takes me forever and a day to wedge myself into these stripper pants, but I ain’t wearing no jeans for superhero business!’”
“But I looked great, didn’t I?” She laughed again, and with her green eyes flashing, Blade saw that memory of the rain in New York City, always falling on her and Matt Murdock.
There was only one answer to that question, whether back then or twenty years later, but Blade was suddenly afraid to speak it out loud.
“Oh, now you’re quiet.” She poked at his mind; he curled up in response.
He’d only really dealt with two women who didn’t want to kill him, let alone get close to him; Nyssa died, and he didn’t know if Karen was dead or not.
“Woman,” he’d told her instead. “You get out of this place, and you find yourself some goddamn baby powder, yeah? It helps with leather.”
--
As the weeks turned to months in the Void and they wondered what exactly would become of their worlds, Eric and Elektra would keep sending thoughts to each other for battle preparations.
They would keep stumbling (or sneaking) into each other’s memories, seeing the people they were: Elektra used to be mad as fuck after her father got murdered. She got herself killed with her own sai, and seeing her come back full of rage, murdering people too violently to be professional, Blade would think (fear) that maybe she came back wrong, like all the stories warned about.
“If I’m the one who actually died, why do people keep thinking you’re dead?” Elektra wondered once, and he’d shrugged.
“I don’t know. Because you still eat and drink like people do?” He’d guessed. “You don’t exactly look dead, either.”
A flash of her younger self comes into his head, wearing some garish red outfit with no sleeves (or bra, lord help him).
Only a young person would look like a goddamn fire-truck in a fight, Eric had groused, and he’d tried not to think about that red scar hovering above her plunging red neckline, or how there looked like half a foot of no-goddamn-thing between her actual waist and her pants’ waistline.
Oh, because your shades AND that trenchcoat flapping around in the wind? Very mature and subtle, Elektra countered.
Well, she got him there.
“So what exactly do I look like, Eric?” She’d teased him out loud. “I swear everyone else is just fine talking about me, but not you.”
He hadn’t answered that question, either, falling back into familiar habits: “Go ask Johnny or Remy, woman. They’ll talk to you about yourself all day.”
Then he’d shrugged and left as his old (young) self would have.
--
On that last day, when the Time Agents came back unarmed and told what was left of the Resistance that they could finally go home, there were four Time Agents and four portals.
Laura and Gambit were allowed to hug and tell each other about the current and past X-Men, but then they’d been separated: One person per portal, the unspoken command was.
And as much as Eric and Elektra felt the drive to jump through their own portals, back to the cities and worlds they’d been locked away from, they’d taken so long to do it that the Time Agents had to start waving them along.
There hadn’t been enough time for Elektra to ask him any questions, or for Eric to finally answer her, but as they got ushered apart, their thoughts and their scents were the same: They both felt the impending sting of being alone.
Back home, Blade would find himself trying to think to Elektra out of habit, or looking up the roads to New York City, but too many fears would stop him from buying a plane ticket or filling up the gas tank.
Which Elektra was in his New York--his version, older and calmer after losing everything she’d had? The young thing still raging, running around with a scar on top of her corset? The one who still had kids with Matt Murdock?
Was there even an Elektra Natchios in his world, where vampires were the usual cause of death?
Sometimes he’d felt like cursing the Void and the day Elektra had pushed at his mind. But then he’d roll it back and ask whoever was up there to get him… something. More time, usually.
--
In Los Angeles, with three of the Resistance back together through a force of nature, Eric remembers the questions Elektra asked him.
But I looked great, didn’t I?
Now Elektra’s here again, like he’d asked Whoever Was Up There--with her crow’s feet and her stray white hairs and her popcorn joints. And he thinks she has never looked better.
So what exactly do I look like, Eric?
Only young folks don’t answer questions properly, he resolves. Next time she asks, I’m telling her. I ain’t no fucking teenager scared of my own shadow.
What kind of questions, ERIC? Elektra has heard him again, those green eyes lighting up with mischief, and in spite of what he’d just thought, Blade winces.
Maybe he’s not scared of his shadow, but hers is a whole different matter.
“You think Tick-Tock is still out there?” Gambit wonders, and Blade leaps on the excuse to look away.
“Can’t tell until we open the damn door,” Blade tells him, unsheathing his buntot-pagi sword.
The city blocks they can see have been put through a meat-grinder, but the rain’s gone from pouring buckets to a softer drizzle. They can’t see any more people roaming the streets, so everyone probably found out that going inside will protect you.
Well… everyone fast enough to get inside.
As a trail of blood marks the streets, the former Resistance members follow it warily. A block or two away, the buwaya’s curled up between a wrecked bus and a cafe. A man’s body lies in its watery front claws, and a handful of limp human shapes are nestled under the curl of its tail.
Soulllllllls, it says happily, and as its see-through teeth crunch through bone, something purple drips out of his chest along with blood.
“Well, he wasn’t lying about putting people on the menu,” Gambit winces. “Ain’t he just happy as a clam now? Acting like a goddamn dog with a chew-toy.”
“Sweetness! Is that you?!”
The three of them freeze as a familiar voice rings out, and a shivering man staggers over: He’s soaked to the bone, wearing what looks like half a body-suit.
“Gambit! I can always count on hearing your Cajun ass five minutes before I see you!” Johnny Storm is alive and well… mostly.
“Johnny?!” Gambit runs over and lifts him clear off the ground. “But Deadpool said you died in the Void! I know he ain’t bright, but how the hell did you get out of there?!”
“I did die! It just… didn’t… stick!” He explains after Gambit lets go. “So you know when I was scouting for Cassandra’s minions in the Void? I met that dick-for-brains in his bondage getup and his pointy yellow boyfriend, and then I got flayed by her. Worst five seconds of my life.”
“Ohhhhh.” The three of them flinch—they’d figured Deadpool was exaggerating about the blood and flaying, but SHIT.
“And… what happened after that?” Blade wonders.
“Well, I don’t know how long I was dead, but Godzilla showed up talking about humannnn soullllllls,” Johnny says. “I guess I was just a soul by then, so… when he ate me, I got my body back. There’s a sky in his mouth, you know?”
--
In an office building with television screens lining the walls that don’t have desks, a Time Agent smiles nervously and stops typing. “Henry! Did anyone authorize bringing Johnny Storm back to life?”
“We didn’t authorize shit!” Henry gripes. “We were just going to backtrack to a couple of days before Johnny got killed, but that thing had other plans.”
“Did you even try to keep the timelines intact?!”
“Well, when a giant water-lizard is yelling about human souls on the dinner menu, you see if you worry about timelines!” Henry retorts.
“We must have ONE Filipino around here who knows what that creature is!”
“Oh, oh! Luz!” Henry dashes over to a brown-skinned woman with black hair. “You called us while we were trying to get Johnny! Tell him what you told us!”
“‘You guys! That’s a buwaya, and it’s hungry!’” Luz recites, and she makes a few gunshot noises. “‘Stop shooting, it’s made of water! Get yourself to civilization, motherfuckerssssss!’”
“Are you saying it’s a god?” The first agent says. “Just run away, or hide indoors with mama?”
“No, gods get worshiped,” Luz replies. “The buwaya are just… there.”
“How does it get to different worlds?!”
“The fuck if I know! It’s made of WATER!” Luz shrugs. “Maybe it evaporates?”
--
With four Resistance members together, through an act of something-that-isn’t-a-god, Blade wonders where exactly he can stab something that’s made of fucking water.
“Hey, Tita,” he says to the air. “You got any advice about Godzilla?”
She doesn’t say anything, but the buntot-pagi sword shivers in Blade’s hand, dripping purple to match the souls of the deceased.
“Now, you ain’t even barbecued that thing yet,” Gambit eyes the sword warily.
The buwaya clenches its watery talons, and the spikes along its back flare up like geysers. SOULS! It shrieks. MY SOULS! I EAT!
“FUCKKKKKKK!” Johnny falls down and clutches his ears. “He wasn’t this loud before!”
SUN?! The buwaya demands, its indigo eyes looking straight at him. YOU HOLD THE SUN?! YOU LEAVE! YOU LEAVE MY SOULS!
And so the skies darken again, the clouds gathering and rain bursting out as Johnny hears whatever terrible thing it’s saying--or feeling--at him.
Nature spirits aren’t always good at words, but they are always good at magic.
And Johnny has fire-powers, the others realize in horror, so Gambit picks him up and drags him down the street.
“We just got you back, angel,” he says through wet hair and a flash of thunder. “I ain’t letting you get ate again by no goddamn lizards!”
ASWANNNNNNNNNG! The buwaya turns to Blade now, his content swirling back into rage, and his great talons pound the concrete as Blade and Elektra start to run as well. YOU WANT MY SOULS?!
“The fuck I don’t, Tick-Tock!” Blade tells it. “The aswang drink blood, remember?!”
Elektra stays with him, and Gambit loops back around with his silver staff flashing out.
Something in Blade feels bad about stopping and steadying his sword--the buwaya’s just hungry, after all. If it wasn’t the size of a bus and if it could eat something besides people, he could just…
The water-dragon roars and its back-ridges froth like the tides. MY SOULS! I EAT! NOT YOU!
The buntot-pagi sword darkens and foams indigo, like the depths of the ocean and the buwaya’s raging eyes.
He would just--
“Time to buddy up!” Elektra links arms with him and Gambit.
--let it be.
The buwaya roars the last time and its great mouth stretches open, as wide as its normal cousins.
But as Johnny warned them, a starry night sky looms up above: Lights blink where the roof of its mouth should be, and there are constellations on its long tongue that Blade doesn’t recognize.
Then the buwaya’s teeth clamp down, and a din of dark water swirls around them.
