Jadevine

—

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.

--

Chapter 2

In the stomach of the buwaya, the former Resistance members are NOT having a good time. They’re being blown around in a tide without an ocean, and they barely know which way is up—the water is dark, but full of the stars in its mouth. There’s lights above them, lights reflected in the water, and lights reflected so far beneath them—it feels more like space than an earthly sea.

“Johnny!” Elektra calls. “Do you remember getting digested?!”

“Uhhhhh… maybe?!” 

“The fuck you mean, ‘maybe?!’” Blade snaps. “Were fire-powers too spicy for this thing?!”

“I just got sloshed around like now!” Johnny hangs on to one of Elektra’s sais. “Like, he chomped me, I got my body back in here, and it’s not like he shit me out OR threw me up! I mostly just—fell?!”

“Well, that’s something!” Blade wants to put away his buntot-pagi sword, but he can’t untie the sheath from his leg, and he doesn’t feel like accidentally stabbing someone. The best he can do is loop the cord around his wrist and try to keep it pointed away from the others.

But the stingray’s barb in the hilt is uncomfortably hot, and the wave-tempered steel is turning red from rust: Another worrying sign that this creature (place?!) is a capital S-Spirit, unbound to regular rules.

“Don’t none of y’all talk about Johnny not knowing what’s in Tick-Tock’s stomach!” Gambit tells them. “This thing ain’t fucking right!”

“The hell it’s not!” Blade admits. He hates the weirder spirits. He hates these not-beasts and their not-bodies and their not-biological urges—

So all they can do is keep clutching anyone else’s clothes-weapons-arms as needed, hoping that they get through this in one piece: Like they did outside of the creature.

Presently the tides calm down. Now the sun cuts through the darkness, painfully bright and confusing after being stuck in the stars, and the somewhat drier air is too cold against Blade’s face and hands.

As Johnny told them, they fall back to earth in a mess of jumbled limbs and soggy clothes, and they toss their loose weapons away before someone ends up impaled.

They hit the sidewalk without too much pain, skidding through the puddles. After the mess is sorted out, again it’s gone quiet, and they move with the unspoken agreement to be careful: They don’t see their accidental ride anywhere.

Yet.

Blade pulls himself up by a street-lamp and hunts for where he saw the buntot-pagi sword land.

“That motherfucking lizard.” He seethes when he finds it, covered in rust as he feared. “Talking about souls all day, and then it ate my goddamn SWORD.”

The rust is thick, but at least it seems loose, with no pits or cracks in the blade that he can see. The wooden half of the hilt has turned into pale driftwood, but the stingray barb is curiously white against the exhausted strips of sharkskin. Blade tries to tighten the wrapping, but unless he wants to use the sword’s bare tang at this point, the barb will be falling out the moment he lets go.

The problems themselves aren’t too bad: He COULD get this sword back in shape pretty quickly… assuming he COULD get home to his supplies (and his swordsmith). But this place is too cold and gray to be Los Angeles. The signs are in English, at least, but that could still mean at least a few countries—

“Is this New York?!” Elektra asks, and Blade’s fists curl up tight.

“Next time I see any goddamn reptile that looks like cousins to a crocodile, I’m GRILLING that fucker.” He rams the buntot-pagi sword into its sheath, stalking over the rust that flakes out.

“But you can’t eat food,” Elektra points out while she grabs her own sais.

“I can, I just don’t care about it.” Except for offerings, that is.

Something glitters on the ground near Elektra: The pangil is as untouched as the stingray’s barb.

“So the buwaya likes jewelry or something?” She picks it up and loops it back onto her neck.

“The sword: Is from civilization,” Blade grouses. “The stingray tail: Is a stingray tail. The pangil: Is made from lightning.”

“Do we have everything?” Johnny asks. “Godzilla’s not going to be far.”

“Uh-oh.” Elektra closes her eyes hard and rubs her temples. “Johnny? Where… was your suit made?”

“What’s wrong?” 

“Angel, you gotta wait before asking US if we got everything.” Gambit taps Johnny’s bare shoulder.

“SHIT.” Johnny scans what’s left of his bodysuit: Now his sleeves and chest are in chunks, and whole patches of the legs are gone. Swathes of Johnny’s skin crisscross between the pieces. “The suit has lasted twenty fucking years! I don’t even know if Reed and Sue are in this world to make me a spare!”

Blade thanks whoever’s up there for leaving Johnny just enough coverage to hide everything important, because even without getting busted for indecency, he’ll run through clothes like… well, wildfire.

After the first week in the Void, they’d stopped giving Johnny clothes and just tossed him scraps of cloth and leather. Sure, he looked like a Mad Max extra, but covering up the bodysuit really helped avoid all the people who wanted to kill him.

Now, if only Johnny had the patience to grow a proper beard instead of shaving the minute his stubble came up, even the Resistance wouldn’t recognize him.

“You can’t be walking in the rain like that.” Gambit takes off his coat.

“Sweetness, I’m from New York! You’re cold when it’s less than seventy degrees! Flame on!” Johnny flies up to check for the buwaya.

But he clutches his ears against something they can’t hear yet, cuts the heat, and speeds right back down like a paratrooper.

“GO-GO-GO!” He grabs Gambit’s hand and starts bolting, the smoke trailing away from their wrists.

But they make sure to let Elektra and Blade get ahead of them, as the slightly more normal (and slightly older) members. How quickly they’ve all fallen back into old habits.

(Blade will miss it—again—whenever he gets back home.)

The buwaya roars at a distance, and the clouds start to roll in again. “YOU HOLD THE SUN?! ARE YOU MY KINSMAN?!”

“If he ate you already, why he so mad at you now?!” Gambit wonders as lightning flashes in the still-clear skies. “Tick-Tock sure don’t like his kin for a Pinoy!”

“Sounds right to me!” Elektra retorts. “Filipinos start family drama over all sorts of shit!”

“Maybe he likes Johnny too much!” Blade says. “What if he eats fire for dessert?!”

—

There are stories in the Philippines about how the moon lost its siblings. There used to be seven of them in the old days, lighting up the sky like a giant’s gleaming necklace, until a dragon saw them—either from the depths of the ocean, or the unlit void up above.

Laho and the Bakunawa are its most common names. Some may call it a naga or Rahu, but it is not known whether the Indian beasts replaced their local cousins, or if they only changed names.

The dragon, like so much of the world, thought that the seven moons were the most beautiful things it ever saw—but it wasn’t a creature of reason, so this only meant it got hungry.

And one glittering night, it leapt from the sea or its sky-home, and it snapped the closest moon in its jaws, with mortals shrieking in grief and horror.

—

Like a fucking crocodile, Blade realizes as they flee, with the videos of tourists feeding crocs and gators from boats flashing through his mind. After I grill that bastard reptile, I’m putting his head on my wall!

—

Night after night the dragon sprang from the darkness and it swallowed another moon whole, and when only one moon was left, we were frightened of losing our last proper light—for the stars, though much loved in their own way, are too small and too scattered to do so.

The villagers stayed up waiting past sundown for the creature again, shivering with pots and weapons and their loudest drums and gongs in wait.

Soon its great head breached the quiet of night again.

The villagers wailed and shrieked, and they beat weapons or instruments as hard as they could. As the great serpent tried to clamp its jaws around our last lonely moon, the ear-splitting racket startled it into spitting the moon out and fleeing.

And when the moon or the sun started to darken or turn strange colors, the ancestors thought their old enemy had seen the spheres’ beauty, and wished to devour them again. So they’d bring out their noise-makers and scare it off again.

—

In the streets, bystanders soon realize that the drenched strangers are running from SOMETHING, and as the buwaya’s bulk looms behind them, people shriek down the sidewalk and clear their path.

But this beast isn’t looking for the moon or the sun: It wants people.

Cars speed off. The buwaya casts no shadow as its neck-spikes shoot up—not a proper one, anyway, for the dark is shot with blue webs of light, the kind that Blade’s seen in aquariums.

“SOULS!” It bellows, towering over fleeing prey, and its raging feet crack down on the trunks of some unfortunate parked cars. “HUMANNNN! SOULLLLLS!”

Oh shit, not again.

“Get all these fuckers inside!” Blade yells to the other three, and so the Resistance members split into pairs along the sidewalk: One person yanks doors open, and the second starts shoving people through.

“INSIDE!” “GET INDOORS!” “LOCK UP!”

Luckily, the message spreads, and the crowds along the streets start cramming themselves through any opening they can.

They don’t know if they can help everyone get inside, but they have to try.

“KINSMAN!” The buwaya stops gaining on them, now: Instead it starts evaporating in a burst of blues and grays, swirling around and around. “WHERE IS MY KINSMAN?!”

The Resistance flinches and staggers on painful legs as the buwaya lifts up, with a chorus of wails from the civilians.

If the buwaya’s acting like a storm, this is from the air pressure dropping. Their joints and ears are popping now, and before the light starts to hurt, Blade smells FEAR coming from the other Resistance members.

When the storm-spirit lifts up to the dark clouds of the other storm above, their meeting makes the sky pulse blue. The smell of ozone, like wires burning, fills Blade’s nose before the concrete gets bit by snarling blue lightning—and too-close thunder BOOMS just a few yards behind his feet, so loud that it feels like his skull will split.

He’s blown sideways against a shaking car, scraping wet gloves around the door’s mirror. As his eyes well up from the wash of light and the shriek in his overloaded ears makes him dizzy, Blade realizes now why ancient people thought lightning was a god.

And he wasn’t even hit properly.

Blade limps around for the other Resistance members, but now the stench of fear surges from the crowd just as he spots the flutter of Gambit’s brown coat.

“No, no—Gambit!” Blade runs even with his knees and joints screaming. If they turn into a mob and start stampeding, they’ll run right over him—

And he knows Gambit's close, but he can't fucking SEE where he's going, so he tries to track Gambit’s scent down the battered street. Soon his healing kicks in and the ringing in his ears smooths out to a high-pitched hum; through the fleeing masses and the green smoke swimming in his vision, Gambit's curled up by what used to be a streetlight, mouth tight as he clutches his ears.

“GAMBIT?!” Blade still can’t see past the dark shapes of his own hands, but even if the streetlight didn’t fall on Gambit, nothing looks good, either: Gambit’s nose and ears are dripping blood onto the slicked leather of his cowl. “COME ON!”

Gambit’s mouth moves, but it’s cut short by coughing, with the nosebleed draining into his throat. And for a couple of terrible seconds, Blade can’t break the man’s pained, shaking hold on his own ears.

“REMY!” If Blade were younger, he could have lifted Gambit in a fireman’s carry (could have made him let go), but that wears him out fast now. “GET UP!”

So now he’s got to pull the Cajun’s heavy arm across his shoulders and drag him. And his ears and his eyes and his back still hurt—

Elektra doesn’t fare any better with Johnny, hunched under his dizzy form. “Oh, we are waaaaay too old for boot camp, Eric!”

Blade hates it when Gambit can’t move. The man is always in control—he is always being still or moving, as smooth as a breeze. Until something else makes him stop, and that’s usually when Blade is forced to remember how goddamn big Gambit is.

Blade is no lightweight even now, but Gambit is heavier and younger. When they knock each other’s legs, Gambit’s silver boots are pushing him any which way. When Gambit stops to cough the nosebleed out again, that iron arm jerks across Blade’s neck and he’s forced to stop. Because Gambit can’t control where his weight’s going, and if they both go down, Blade doesn’t know if he can pick him up again.

But how big are people compared to a storm?

Welcome to girl world, Eric! Elektra tells him in his mind, for she must have heard his thoughts—it’s not like anyone can hear REGULAR voices right now. A lot of guys don’t like it when you remind them that someone will eventually be stronger than you!

Young guys, I bet! Young office workers or gym rats, too, whose only fights are against women with no training or drunk men in bars.

And suddenly they both remember Frank Castle.

“Civilians don’t know shit about fighting,” Frank mused. “I was in Delta Force before I crossed over to the FBI. They both love to poach from the other side when you work for bosses that want people dead. My friend Dolph told me once that a lot of wannabe generals bragged about hitting their wives and kids, and then they’d shake in their boots once he walked up. He would have given Remy a hard time—six foot and five inches, and his retired weight was two hundred pounds. I would not fight that man if he was thirty years old and however many pounds heavier.”

“You love to hear wife-beaters get thrashed,” Elektra sighed.

“He said it was less beating them up and more making them lose control. Most women recruits, when you pin them or lift them up? They start kicking and biting. They already know most men are bigger than most women. But a lot of men recruits, they’d just panic when Dolph did it.”

“They don’t like it when someone can fight back,” Gambit nodded. “When I was in New Orleans—”

“Aw fuck!” Johnny got up. “Let me know when he’s done.”

“Ain’t nothing too scary for you, angel! I was ten!”

“When you were ten, you had no parents!” Johnny retorted, but at least he sat back down. “I swear to God, none of your stories about fucking N’arlins end well!”

“Oh! Johnny is mad if he’s trying to speak Cajun!” Elektra noted with a grin.

“I’ll keep things PG-13 for our sensitive boy Johnny,” Remy laughed. “Anyhow, I was smaller than Laura when I was ten. Other street boys used to whoop me.”

“What did you do to them?” Laura asked. “Did you have your powers?”

“They showed up when I was thirteen, little niece. And I didn’t have to do anything, so long as I was nearby,” Gambit admitted. “Street kids, some of them just be mad all the time. Or they think they are, but they hurting instead. Kids get mean as fuck, but they don’t know any better. Ten years later, that was after I got adopted and took up dancing, and by then I was a foot taller, too. Ain’t nobody recognized me when I got back—the slowest one took damn near half an hour—but once I said I was Remy the homeless kid, all them boys would flinch. And I be like, ‘You think I’m holding a grudge about kids scrapping? Just don’t start nothing again and I won’t remember nothing.’”

“So it was like the lab?” Laura was born in what seemed like the opposite of the streets—a sterile and unfeeling lab, where mutant kids were birthed by unknown Mexican women—but what they’d heard of that place was never good. “We didn’t fight each other, but all the scientists did was tell us to fight other people.”

“Just some smart-ass prison guards.” Gambit had wrapped a long arm around her. “Not quite like the streets, but a lot of us end up in prison. You ain’t even met your daddy until you were eleven.”

Now, nobody liked hearing about Gambit’s and Laura’s shitty childhoods, and by extension the ways that mutants were treated in their worlds.

But Blade had remembered being thirteen and homeless himself, and how he’d fed on homeless humans to soothe his thirst for blood until Abraham Whistler came along.

He and Gambit, they’d grown up too similar for comfort.

And he wondered how the fuck Gambit ended up so nice.

—

“Why are you the only one who can hear, woman?!” Blade notices in the present day, after Elektra’s caught up with him: There are no red lines washing off her face in the rain, and while her heart is battering hard inside her ribs and her joints hurt like his own, there’s no ear-ringing or headaches. “At least I had to heal up first!”

“Either because I died, or because you gave me the pangil!” Elektra skids into a “crack” on the sidewalk that splashes her shins and Johnny’s unsteady ankles. “But you tell me! You’re the only one who’s fought Filipino spirits here!”

“Twice! I fought them twice!” Blade sloshes down there himself. “You know who we could use right now? Frank!”

“Another fifty-year-old?!” Elektra retorts. “Frank didn’t even have powers!”

“Sure, but get the three of us together, shave off a few years for our good days, and we all make one damn good thirty-year-old!”

—

“Dolph didn’t really say the other part,” Frank told them another day, over what passed for a meal—a whole box of Vienna Sausage cans. “It was more like you noticed patterns. In Delta Force, people will look the other way if you disobey orders for a good reason, but when Dolph went on a mission, he just clammed up and worked with anyone around. Didn’t matter if he liked them. You think soldiers can pick who they’re deployed with, like fantasy football? We got three heroes who are pushing retirement, a blind hero pushing retirement,Mr. Zippo Lighter, a dancer with a gambling problem, and a teenager with a bad manicure. Normies would throw a fit if all they had was us.”

“Normies ain’t sent to the Void, Frank,” Gambit laughed and upended his can before throwing it in the garbage. “Not on purpose, anyway. The Time Agents put our worlds in storage and dropped us off before we had time to finish cooking beignets. How many guns you got when you doing house chores?”

“You complain that I bring guns to the laundromat,” and Frank rolled his eyes, “but guess who’s all happy to use them?”

“Gotta keep that punk-ass dryer from stealing your socks,” Johnny cracked.

Blade tries not to remember how everyone had laughed or at least smiled except Frank, perpetually weary. If Blade thought he was serious, at least he managed a couple of jokes now and then.

That man never laughed, except in memories with his family. But the ghosts of his wife and son, they’d follow Frank around when Laura read comics with Gambit about himself. They came to Frank when Elektra and another Daredevil reunited (and Blade especially couldn’t tell her anything then), and Blade had seen-felt them waiting by Frank’s room after that Daredevil died (because how many people did Elektra need to lose?).

“Dolph told me at the end of the day, you gotta pick between fighting alone and fighting with someone else. ANYONE else.”

When Frank had died fighting Cassandra Nova, that was the first and last time Blade saw him smile.

—

“Frank!” Blade tried to stop the blood coming from the Punisher’s ribs, but the wound was too big and his hands got slippery. “We told you not to fight that bitch! You got guns and trauma! She got psychic powers to end everyone who’s not her fucking lackeys!”

“I have a lot of guns,” Frank insisted, mouth bloody. “And I got you all, too.”

“You suicidal dumbass!”

The ghost of Maria Castle appeared, with her bright blonde ponytail and her soft pastel clothes. But there were laugh lines on her face now, and white strands mixing with the blonde, matching up with Frank’s graying black hair and too-gaunt cheeks.

“Stay out of this, woman! You dead already!” He waved at her blindly, like she was a stray cat, though it was never a good sign for a ghost to get old.

“I’m here for my husband, not his friend.” She smiled at him, and now came the piercing, desperate fear in Blade’s chest.

Ghosts didn’t talk to him—they just ran through memories! But she knew he was here, and she knew Frank was hurt—

“Frank don’t have friends no more! Just memories of friends!” And he was the only one here, anyway.

“Maria?” Frank asked hoarsely. “You—you told me to stop the first time.”

“To be fair… someone else did it now.” Maria sat down on the other side and took one of his shaky hands. “I’m not arguing with a technicality. I think you’ve already seen enough.”

“Dad!” Will Castle arrived, too, a young man with brunette hair. “Come on!”

“Will.” And now Frank was crying. “You grew up?”

Blade saw a flicker of those two lying limp on what looked like a wooden bridge: Will Castle had been a blonde little boy when he died, eight or ten years old—so much smaller than either of his parents.

“Boy, leave him alone!” Sure, Blade knew what was happening—he just didn’t like it.

This sour motherfucker was happy. Ghosts were talking to the living, not just flicking through memories. Too much blood coated the skull on Frank’s worn Kevlar vest, the aroma metallic and wild, and it made Blade’s vampire instincts scream for that thick pool of red—

“Frank!” Blade pleaded. “Get up! You been shot plenty of times!”

“My—my friends—” Frank shook now, wide-eyed and pale from lack of blood, but still he tried to reload his skull-headed gun. “They’re in trouble.”

“It’s okay,” she told him. “They’re just like you, honey. Tough as nails. They’ll get through this.”

And for one terrible, chest-squeezing second, Blade wanted to turn Frank into a vampire.

But the scent of death loomed over Frank now. He’d always smelled like he had one foot in the grave, and now it was all but swallowing him whole. His whole family died from the mob, after all, and the only thing he had left was killing criminals.

Blade smelled saltwater and hot sand in Frank’s memory of Florida. The younger Frank had jet-black hair and muscles for days, unhidden by his swim trunks. And he was so very happy, roaming the beach with his family…

“Come and rest, Frank.” Maria nestled her head on Frank’s bloody chest, her silhouette bursting yellow against the bone-white skull of the Punisher.

So Frank Castle finally went to sleep and he dropped that unloaded gun, his red smile all but glowing.

Laura had cried when she found Blade still there, hunched mute over Frank’s body, with the gun clenched in one hand.

There had been no time to bury him. There rarely was in the Void, not with so many threats from so many worlds, and Cassandra Nova on the rampage.

After the frantic run home, Remy, Elektra, and Johnny drank warm whiskey and flat beer for most of the night, bloodshot eyes and hushed voices.

Their drinks smelled like loss and the aching crush of memories, whirling around the empty chair where Frank should have been.

Laura could get drunk,but she didn’t stay that way for long unless she chugged the strongest liquor she could find.

Remy had offered Blade a bottle of beer, but still unused to human food, he’d just stayed with them and let them talk or stay quiet as needed.

—

In New York City, struggling under the weight of their heavier, younger friends, Eric and Elektra trek around clustered rubble. They tiptoe around oil slicks, chunks of concrete or metal from the wounded streets, and the torn-up bodies with death’s smell hanging all over them.

For Blade, death is heady and sweet—like too much cologne, or enough candy to make adults gag. It’s different from the physical stuff happening to your body—death-as-a-concept seems more like a place you can go to or not, because some people die of a broken heart and others just won’t stay dead, not even after getting beat so bad that Blade himself would have hated it.

He often wonders what made Elektra come back from a chest-stab, when Frank was always yearning to leave. Only the scar hiding under her vest and that faded but sickly-sweet scent of death would let people know how Elektra wasn’t quite normal anymore.

“SOULS!” The buwaya screams from the pouring clouds. Without even the semblance of a body this time, it’s more terrifying than it was in Los Angeles. “HUMANNNNNN! SOULLLLLLS!”

—

“Jesus Christ! This is Jurassic Park, not a superhero movie!” Deadpool says to the Author at home, finishing off his lunch. (His home… with locked doors and closed windows.) “Nature finds a way… to eat Johnny Storm? He wasn’t my favorite, but that doesn’t mean I wanted him to die the first time!”

“He’s talking about fanfiction again.” Logan turns the TV on, rubbing his temple. “Time to ride this one out, Laura.”

“He smells different,” Laura warns him, and now Logan has to look back at Wade.

Well… Vanessa said that things happen after Wade talks to the furniture or he thinks he’s in a movie.

“Yeah, I really like dinosaurs,” the Author tells Deadpool, setting a mug of coffee down on the corner of a desk full of paper. “Not as much as horses, but they’re definitely my top five favorite creatures.”

Logan sniffs as Wade’s scent changes: His vitals are spiking—from readiness, yes, but not panic. His heart’s pumping steady, and everything else seems normal. There’s something floating around him like smoke, too.

Goddamn it, Wade smells like… like Jean Grey or Charles Xavier did, when they saw something. Or when someone saw them.

“This dumbass better not be a psychic,” Logan gripes to Laura as the weather reports come on. “We already get enough shit from him.”

“And why are dinosaurs in your top five favorites?” Deadpool asks.

“Because… I like exploring how nature is outside of our control,” the Author admits sheepishly, drinking some coffee. “I mean, I live in North California. We got the ocean next door, and there’s forests everywhere.”

“Ma’am, you said this was a road trip, not a Dark Souls boss fight,” Deadpool points out. “I have yet to see one car in this fanfic that didn’t zoom away from the eldritch being like a NASCAR hopeful, or get crushed under its terrible claws! Setting the story up is one thing, but do you have ADHD, perchance?”

“Well, I show symptoms of ADHD, but not enough to get the fucking meds,” the Author huffs. “They recommended mindfulness meditation to set a routine. You know, the thing I already told them I’m not good at.”

“The failures of American healthcare, people! So why is the lizard asking about his family?”

“Because it’s foreshadowing, sir,”she retorts. “He’s not right about Johnny, but he’ll find his real family eventually.” She checks her notes. “They’ll get to your place soon, and the storm will stop in a couple more days. I’m not THAT mean.”

—

In the living room, Logan and Laura are watching the news, and it is bad. Streets on the TV are covered in ankle-deep water, and the winds have been battering furniture, potted plants, and tree branches against the walls.

“This looks like a cyclone, but we are on the entirely wrong coast for that,” a baffled reporter says. “Long Island has canceled school attendance until further notice. Parents in other neighborhoods, it’s rough driving in this weather. When in doubt, stay home except for groceries and necessary trips. If anything changes, we will send an official flood warning for the entire city.”

Laura checks out the window: There’s no floods yet, but the street’s gutters are really full.

—

“Wait a minute!” Deadpool realizes. “Gambit is a dancer, and Blade can spot dancers and actors a mile away. And the whole story started with a Filipino monster! Are YOU a Filipino dancer or actor appearing in this fanfic? You sly creature! You made a self-insert character, didn’t you?!”

“I have such conflicting feelings about Gambit,” the Author says. “Like, I watched this guy in X-Men Evolution, and I had fun seeing things explode, but twenty years later, he’s Channing Tatum and he’s HOT. Sure, I’m thirsty for Live-Action Gambit, but how is Rogue going to get her man?! So I made another chick with gloves, trauma, and shitty powers! We’ll see if the studios decide to bring Comic-Accurate Rogue to the films. I looked for canon Filipino characters, but apart from Blade fighting the aswang, I could only find Anitun Tabu, and she’s not Tagalog.”

“There’s no self-insert like a nerdy actor using fanfic in place of therapy,” Deadpool says. “American healthcare strikes again!”

“Oh, I’m not an actor. I just really, really wanted to be, but it never quite worked out,” Suddenly she’s needling him, voice tight and eyes narrow. “Why do you think I’m writing FANFIC?”

“Lovely… Callbacks to things I said?” He twists his hands. “That hurts. But… wait, Gambit said he was born in the Void! Why is he meeting the most plot-protected Resistance members and talking about his comic-accurate shitty life?”

“No, he thought he was born in the Void. Because the Void is where worlds are sent to die, and I’m guessing that fucks with your head,” the Author says. “This is more foreshadowing.”

“Oh boyyyyy, that sounds autistic.”

“Sure, but I’m still trying to convince people my memory is shitty enough to get ADHD meds.” the Author finally drinks from the mug of coffee and makes a face. “Oh, it’s cold. Anyway, Deadpool, you’re an obnoxious motherfucker, but you did more for Gambit in one satire than Marvel did in ten years. My boy Channing talks about Gambit as if he almost died, but you finally put him on screen. And it gives me hope that I can finally get somewhere, BEFORE I die or I get too old.”

“That… that hurts in a different way,” Deadpool says. “I give you HOPE?”

“Where else am I gonna get it, Wade?!” Her voice gets hoarse and lower, and she grabs his shoulders. “Wade! WADE! GET UP!”

Deadpool jerks away from the fourth wall to hear thunder, the TV’s murmuring across the room, and his own ears ringing.

“WADE!” Logan is shaking him. “It’s fucking bad out there! Call Vanessa and—”

“Two days,” Wade rasps.

“What?”

“The Author’s just talking about how nature is out of our control! All we need is to hide like frightened children for two more days!”

Nearby, Laura has one arm linked with Blind Al’s, and the other holds Mary Puppins.

She and her dad take a look at each other.

“You doing coke again, or are you about to get into some superhero shit?” Blind Al wonders.

“Damn it.” And Logan sighs. “You weren’t even watching the news.”

Since they can’t leave a dog and a blind woman alone in this weather, they trade off one adult for each outside task.

—

Logan and Laura do a grocery run, wading through deepening water and panic-buyers, trying to gather three days’ worth of non-perishable food into the cart.

Logan can’t help grabbing an armful of things from a lone white man’s stuffed cart. He moves them to a nearby dark-skinned man’s cart, who has a kid and a teenager trailing behind him.

“HEY!” The first man puffs up indignantly. “You took my stuff!”

“It ain’t your stuff without a receipt,” Logan snaps. “The news said to get three days of extra food, not three months! You a bottomless pit or what?”

“You still can’t—”

“You want to take it back from that guy and his kids?” Logan straightens up and glares—down—at him. “Go ahead, bub.”

He hunches and scurries off to the cashier.

Thank you! The little boy waves, but his voice doesn’t come from his mouth.

There is that startling push of someone getting into Logan’s head, but even without knowing who it’s from, it’s short and clumsy.

Danny, get out of there! The teenager flinches and gestures to his dad, who picks up the younger boy. This is smooth and practiced: It must have happened before.

“Jessie, take the cart. I need to tell Danny something.”

Is your name Logan? My friend is Logan, and he’s really short and he likes Star Wars! And so the kid’s mouth—well, head—is running a mile a minute now, even as his dad is hauling him away.

The kid’s voice gets a lot quieter after thirty or forty feet.

Motor-mouth aside, there’s none of the pain or intrusion Logan’s felt when adult psychics fuck with him. This is just a kid half his size, blundering around.

Logan wonders how long he’s had his powers.

The dark man smells normal, but the teen and his brother smell like they’ve got that mutant gene.

They only go a few aisles away—hidden enough for regular people, especially with the crowds, but Logan can still hear them.

“Buddy, don’t do that with strangers,” the father whispers. “You don’t know if they’ll get mad at you.”

“But he was nice and he gave us stuff!”

“No, Danny, sometimes people start nice and then—”

Logan walks over now, and he’s not sure if he should be sad or relieved that they think he’s NICE.

“Don’t worry about it,” Logan tells them, and the man flinches as he spots the long shadow darkening the aisle.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. Whatever he saw, he’s just a kid. We’re trying to teach him boundaries and all, but only one person can actually—”

“I didn’t track you guys,” Logan tells him. “Not the way you think.”

How does he show them he’s a different mutant without using the claws, or talking about scents? He scans the aisle: It’s almost picked clean, with just a few items left and loose screws scattered on the floor. The uncaring crowds are surging past; nobody’s bothering to pick up the scraps just yet.

Logan picks a screw up, drawing the point over the back of his arm with a grimace. Blood wells up, and he raises his arm so they can see the wound close. 

“Dad! He’s like me and Jessie!” The kid tugs at his father’s sleeve.

“I didn’t know that before,” Logan says, and he quiets down the irritating voice in his head because it’s not a LIE. “What I did know is that guy was being a—a jerk. No fu—freaking… shame. Stuffing his cart like that.”

Presently, their teenagers come along with the carts.

“Dad, people are starting to watch us,” Laura warns him.

“Yeah, we’re almost done.” Logan takes the cart again; super-strength aside, Laura is way too short to fend off crowds of panicking grocery shoppers. They’ll be going after the food, not her.

“Thanks for helping, Logan,” the teenager calls to him out loud.

They pick what crowded lines have room. Soon, even Logan can’t see or smell the family anymore.

In the car, Laura makes sure the windows are closed. “Psychics?”

“Mm-hmm,” he confirms. “Kid needs to learn the rules before getting in people’s heads like that.”

Now, psychics talk about rules and ethics with mind-powers, and the things they should or shouldn’t do when they get into people’s heads. But they act more like their powers are limbs, or muscles that they work out. A lot of them go through the motions to move a boulder or push an enemy, and others use funky little gestures instead. About half of them don’t know they’re doing it, and they get surprised or embarrassed when someone mimics them.

If a psychic is beat by another psychic, or if they’re cut off from their powers, sometimes they beg and thrash like an animal in a trap, and their scents are full of pain, the same as if their bodies are caught.

Charles had laughed at him (nicely) once, when Logan asked if he had the strongest telepathy in the world because he couldn’t walk.

“Logan, I had my powers for quite a while before that,” Charles said. “As a young man, I got in a fight with an alien called Lucifer, and he ended the fight after he dropped a boulder on me.”

“Hmph. Shit sounds rough,” he’d admitted. “Is that why you preach non-violence now?”

Another kind (nostalgic?) laugh. “It was an adjustment to start using a wheelchair, but my views on mutants weren’t informed by becoming disabled.”

Driving off through soggy streets, Logan doesn’t know if he’ll see Danny, Jessie or their father again.

Charles, he thinks as he turns the wipers on. We got kids who might need you. He doesn’t know if it’s a prayer, or if he hopes some version of Charles Xavier will answer him.

— In another part of the city, on the streets drained of people, the Resistance has recovered enough for everyone to run on their own power.

Now the only stumbling they do is across an empty lot.

Or, basically empty.

A rusty fence is rimmed with old caution tape around a house gutted from fire. Half the roof is gone and the timbers exposed like bare bones. But there’s a shed in the yard with its roof intact, and the door looks solid enough.

“Let’s go!” Gambit calls hoarsely, and he waits at a corner of the fence for Johnny. “Tick-Tock hates you the most, angel! You can’t light up without letting him know where we are!”

“Yeah, point!” Johnny takes a look at the dragon-turned-storm sweeping over the city before he gets a boost over, but as he runs for the shed’s door, he only rattles a padlock. “Oh shit, it’s locked!”

Gambit waves for Blade or Elektra while Johnny swears and starts heaving at the door.

“Johnny, don’t you think about burning nothing!” Blade warns.

As thunder booms and Gambit launches him up, Blade can’t help looking back at the sky while it cracks open again with blue light. When he lands and struggles to roll—it has been a long fucking day—he grips the quaking buntot-pagi in its driftwood handle.

Gambit takes hold of Elektra’s shoulder and hoists her over the fence. It’s stiffer and slower than usual, but he can do it.

Then he backs away and his scent changes, with his explosion-energy roiling in him as he runs at the fence. He uses his bo-staff to launch himself over, but even with that, it’s too high and too long of a jump to be quite normal—Blade thinks Gambit’s floating for a moment, at the peak of his arc.

But as terrible and beautiful as he moves when he uses his powers, Gambit still looks like a human. The same way he still grieves like a human, faces death like a human, and he deals with shitty other people like a human.

And then gravity catches up and he hits the ground too hard, so he has to crank himself up with his staff. “Oh, bon amis,” he pants as he runs over. “I’m running out of juice.”

“We’ll get a break if we could just OPEN THIS MOTHERFUCKING DOOR!” Johnny heaves again at the stubborn lock.

As Johnny and Elektra team up to pry the lock open with one of Elektra’s sais, it comes away instead, dusting their hands with dead wood.

“Shit,” Johnny’s mouth tightens. “Uh… good news! It’s not locked anymore! Is the buwaya gonna find us, though?!”

“It’s either no roof or no lock!” Elektra retorts. “Everyone in!”

Blade holds the door open for the others. As the wind starts threatening to blow the door open, he glares at it and rips his buntot-pagi out of the half-dead handle, then shoves it in the spot where the failed lock was.

It glows purple, and the wind stops whistling through the gaps.

“Oh.” Blade looks at the others. “We got a lock.”

It’s not a PERFECT solution: They can’t feel the winds, but they can hear them—and the buwaya, too, as it crashes back down among distant screams.

“Human! Soulllllllllls!”

Three of them flinch: It’s far, sure, but it’s louder than anything they heard in the warehouse.

Johnny doubles over again from whatever is making him and that lizard too familiar, and Gambit puts his arm over Johnny’s ears.

“Just wait a bit, angel,” Gambit whispers. “Tick-Tock’s not a homebody! We gotta ride the storm out, and then we’ll—”

The stingray’s barb is boiling hot near Blade’s cautious wrist, and it’s dripping purple again.

“Does it sense spirits coming?” Elektra wonders.

“It don’t do nothing with spirits,” Blade says. “Not that Gomez knows, anyway. He just said it poisons them. Maybe the buwaya’s got more juice to get it angry?”

The Pinoy spirits might take Blade for an aswang, but that same error means they don’t always tell him the finer details of nature and gods and Pinoy magic. After all, they think he already knows.

Even if they realize he’s fighting them half-blind, they figure he’s mixed or he’s American-born, but sometimes Blade needs to tell them that he’s not Filipino at all. It doesn’t help that he barely looks out of place among all those dark-skinned spirits and their dark curly hair.

“You’re not always seeing them, exactly,” the swordsmith Gomez explains as he sharpens the sword. “Not all Pinoys are super dark with afros, but people might see the spirits like that. Sometimes they’re pale instead—it depends.”

“So they’re shapeshifters?”

“It’s more like they have glamours. Or you have expectations.” Gomez checks the edge and starts working on the other side. “Look, we had colorism before Spain: Dark-skinned people lookedpoor because they had to work outside. But Spain, they brought a caste system. They said the pagan natives were short and dark and foreign, and the good natives who played nice were tall and pale, or just brown enough to be exotic. Sometimes you’ll see spirits with tattoos now, even if their people didn’t used to have them. You see what you think monsters should look like. And Spain, they called people with dark skin ‘monsters.’”

Remembering that, Blade realizes all the times that Filipino spirits called Blade an aswang. Was it just because that’s their word for ‘vampire,’ or did they think he was an actual aswang, because he’s dark?

Does he still think monsters look like himself?

It makes him feel strange that Filipino monsters think he’s a Filipino monster, like when the deceased on the Day of the Dead think he’s one of them, a dead person who’s just visiting relatives.

“What does holding the sun mean?” Elektra wonders, jolting him out of his thoughts.

“When Filipino spirits say that, it means we’re up in the daytime. A lot of times, it also means ‘humans’ in general.”

“Well, Johnny is human. But why is it asking about its kinsman?”

“The buwaya doesn’t speak human languages,” Eric tells her. “Godzilla ain’t bright—he could mean a lot of things.”

“Fuck, he’s eating now,” Johnny rasps into Gambit’s elbow, and they know he’s not just remembering what happened in Los Angeles.

In the magical realm, something like a rope coils tight around their Human Torch, and Blade and Elektra both know that the other can feel it.

“Johnny?” Elektra asks. “Did you feel or see anything before you got eaten?”

“Sure, let’s start from square one,” Johnny untangles from Gambit, but he’s not happy: “First things first: I got flayed. Motherfucking shit, I hate Cassandra Nova! So there’s the worst five seconds of my life. Painpainpainpainpain. I think she made sure to take me apart after my skin got lost, but my soul or my thinking-parts needed to… catch up? My body is a pool of innards in the dirt, but Thinking-Me just feels everything on fire in the bad way, so when I’m not mentally screaming, I’m going, ‘Anyone who’s listening! I need you to do me a solid! You gotta heal me or kill me again, asap! Smaug! Zeus! Baba Yaga! Please! Put me the fuck out of my misery!’”

“Ohhhh.” That’s from both Blade and Elektra, but she’s the one who follows up. “Looks like Tick-Tock heard your prayers.”

“Is he a god?!”

“No, gods get worshiped,” Blade says. “But Filipino crocodiles, they’re high up in the spirit-world. They got stuff to do with life and death.”

The rattling of the buntot-pagi quiets down. Blade holds it in place, but it doesn’t feel loose, and the wind and rain are starting to let up.

“Boy, why were you praying to Baba Yaga?” Blade wonders. “I don’t know what she is, but I know she ain’t a god. Or the kind of person you want help from.”

“Hey! I said heal me or kill me!” Johnny retorts. “Maybe she wanted some Human Torch barbecue! I was messed the fuck up, remember? Smaug isn’t even real!”

“He ain’t real in our worlds, Johnny,” Gambit cautioned. “Laura’s daddy and Mr. Sunshine didn’t know me. And they were sure as hell taller than my Wolverine.”

Shit, there was that reminder about how many different worlds were floating out in the universe. They already had one dragon trying his damnedest to kill a city, and they didn’t need a second one.

Blade looks out of the crack by the door: The storm is all he can hear for now, with no sign of the buwaya’s rampage. “Just don’t ring her up again too soon.”

—

Wade, in a classic comedy cut to a semi-related scene, is waiting for the Wolverine family to get back home. He sends a text to everyone he knows is in driving distance of New York City: Hey guys, it’s Wade. Big storm in New York City. Everyone okay?

The next thirty minutes or so has a flurry of texts about every five minutes, and after checking his What’s App with tight lips, he must have accidentally texted EVERYONE. Scanning the responses, he spots two of them:

Vanessa’s text is short and sweet: Don’t worry, Wade. I’m keeping an eye on the water. <3

Mate, I’m in California, but thanks for checking, someone’s text says.

Whose number changed??? Why are you in California??? Wade texts back.

It’s Russell, mate. You got shot ten years ago, remember?

This dumbass got shot SO MANY TIMES, Domino texts. You need something more specific.

We were locked up and THEN you got shot.

I’m so sorry, baby girl, that’s not enough! Wade texts back. Are there non-confidential details that you can talk about?

Not right now, mate, the mystery man answers. Stay dry out there.

Hang on! If you’re calling me mate… are you British or Australian???

Close! New Zealand!

Fuck yeah, we have ONE detail!

I’ll find more illegal shit to jog your memory later. In a California cafe, a young Maori man with brown skin, long black curls, and a black beard chuckles.

—

“Is that more foreshadowing?!” Deadpool bolts up and starts hunting for the Fourth Wall. “HEY! BABY GIRL! WHO DO I KNOW THAT LOOKS LIKE KHAL DROGO?!”

“Oh, you weren’t pretending that you didn’t remember him?” And the Author laughs. “Bro, he told you his name and what you guys did!”

“Yeah, but RUSSELL?! The least heroic of superhero legal names?! He said it’s been ten fucking years!” Deadpool retorts.

—

In the dim shed, cold and cramped as it is, at least the Resistance can finally rest. Gambit and Johnny probably couldn’t move much farther than each other even if they wanted to, and Blade tries to squeeze past Elektra and a stack of sagging boxes.

His coat catches, and he yanks at it once or twice before too many things start moving and clanking for his comfort, so he sheds it instead.

“Bitch-ass coat,” he gripes as he sits somewhere in front of her instead, leather shifting past leather. “You ain’t got stuck on nothing for twenty damn years.”

“Oh, it’s the same coat?” Elektra must be grinning near his temple. Sure, he can’t see her face, but he can hear her, and he knows what her eyes look like when she’s about to tease someone (him). “And here I thought you finally had your first mid-life crisis, Eric.”

“Wait,” Gambit asks above Johnny’s shoulder. “How come the Filipinos in the Thieves’ Guild didn’t say nothing about Tick-Tock? I heard about the stingray tail, but Pinoys from the islands call their cops crocodiles. ‘Cause they hungry for a fight, or for money. I ain’t heard from them if anyone came back after getting smoked like Johnny!”

“Jesus Christ, sweetness!” Johnny puts his head in his heads. “At least my mind’s off the lizard! How do you know that shit?!”

And now everyone remembers that Gambit used to be a criminal.

But, well… he doesn’t talk about it a lot.

Blade thinks that this is yet another sign that their Remy LeBeau isn’t old, but he’s not young, either.

Young men who lived on the streets? A lot of them are still hurting, or still trying to hurt people. Gambit isn’t hurting, not in the raw and stinging way that young men are. No, he is steadfast (experienced?), charming (kind?), and once Laura came around—the only person he’d met in the Void connected to that missing Wolverine he’d been talking about—he’d tell her endless stories about Charles Xavier and the X-Men, and all the stuff they got up to (family).

“Were they Catholic?” Blade asks. “They might not have known themselves. This kind of stuff is… told as needed.”

Hell, he doesn’t even know if Remy is Catholic. As much as he talks about God and angels and the teachings of Jesus, their Remy LeBeau doesn’t act Catholic.

—

When Johnny passed out on Remy’s shoulder, Elektra and Laura had shuffled away to get him and themselves into actual beds.

Remy, though, he just took his gloves and coat off, and he held vigil for Frank with a chipped wine-glass full of deep and dark red Mavroudi wine. To Blade, the offering on the table smelled like the sunny waters of Greece, and of a man who took twenty years to get home.

“Frank don’t drink wine,” Blade had said to him. “Not enough to know that fancy Greek stuff.”

“Ain’t always the point to give him stuff he’d pick, Monsieur Haint.” The Cajun shook his head. “Am I gonna ask him to crack open some cans of beer, like we watching a game? I don’t need psychic powers to know our drinks didn’t smell nice to the spirits.”

“They smelled like grief,” Blade admitted.

“I don’t know if you knew street kids, Frank.” Remy poured himself some wine, into a regular glass with a spiderweb of cracks, and it smelled normal: Fruity, sweet, and dark. “I didn’t set foot in a real church till I was thirteen—after Jean-Luc officially adopted me, instead of just fostering me. The shelter chapels, they soured me when I was little. I knew what to do, but I only went to Mass if they wouldn’t let me in. Stand here, kneel there, listen to folks talk however long they want; and now you pray, or keep quiet while other folks pray. Once the paperwork went through with Jean-Luc, I started going every week, and church is more tolerable when you ain’t hungry. Folks don’t say I’m a bad Catholic, but I’d rather save the time from going to church and be nice to people instead, after seeing how that church crowd does things. They get off the pews and they boss some waitress around like she’s their maid, or they act a fool and scream at the bartender like they didn’t just hear the pastor talk for an hour.”

Remy’s hands were shaking now—was it from grief, or his memories, or just all the booze he drank?—and a bit of wine sloshed out, coating his fingers like blood. “Frank, y’all ate like you was deader than Eric over there. Just scooping up whatever was in front of you, no making faces about things you don’t like. I hope you let yourself taste something again, now that you’re finally across. If you don’t like it, have your pretty wife try some.”

A trick of the light as he held the glass up made his bloodshot eyes turn red—but the scent of the wine changed from wine to the sunny ocean, and the deepening scent of magic put Blade on edge.

“Remy, what you doing?” Blade didn’t know what this shit was, but he knew it wasn’t Catholic. The Cajun’s spirit was open like a door now, blowing the smells of salt and sun all over the room.

“Look, neither of the Matts much liked alcohol, and I get that,” he said. “But Frank? He’s our boy.”

“You got some on the table! You don’t gotta eat on a grown man’s behalf!”

“Oh! Monsieur Haint is worried about more haints, is he?” Remy laughed, his eyes bright and his voice dark from the alcohol. “Street folks, we have our own customs, and there’s a lot of us that figured how the spirits need help eating sometimes.”

A more formal offering like the cider Remy had left for the first Matt Murdock, that was normal. Leaving portions for the spirits to join the meal, that kind of stuff was all over the planet as far as Blade had seen. Even Catholics (for they were always the odd ones of the Christian religious family) might let themselves leave their dead loved ones a plate or a drink that they once loved.

Eating something yourself, though, and telling the spirits to taste it through you? Most witches or mages—the ones that hadn’t been homeless, at least—they said that was possession, or too close to it for their liking. They’d say a spirit might not want to leave, or you might attract the wrong kind.

But what do street kids care about the spirit world’s dangers? Blade realized bitterly. The real world is bad enough for them.

Yet their own Frank Castle appeared, worn and tired but finally relaxed. With bloody mouth and bloody gear, his transparent hand picked up a shadow of the wine glass on the table.

“Goddamn, Remy,” Blade said. “The fuck kind of magic are street kids working down South?”

Remy laughed again. “When I start eating with the spirits, folks say all sorts of stories. My wife near had a heart attack when she saw me leaving out food the first time. Maybe the kids I knew lucked out, or maybe the spirits just didn’t feel like messing with us.”

“You told me you ain’t met a haint before,” Blade remembered. “But you good with calling up the spirits to ride you for a drink?”

“Telling someone to eat ain’t like being ridden, Eric,” Remy assured him, but Blade wouldn’t know what the fuck kind of difference there’d be. “I didn’t learn enough to do anything like Voodoo in the streets, even if I had the bloodlines.”

“Then how’d you just call up Frank Castle?!” Blade demanded, pointing to their friend’s ghost out of habit. “You can’t even see him!” He forced himself to put his arm down.

“Frank’s our boy, and he ain’t too far yet,” Remy mused, shifting back in his chair. “Look, enough folks in New Orleans know about the street-gods if they need to—at least enough to keep from making them mad. If we were doing something we shouldn’t, I’d say someone would have told me in ten years.”

“You think people care about orphans messing with street-gods, Remy?!” And Blade doesn’t know why he’s so upset, but he tries to keep his voice down. “You tried to steal from some guy, and he decided to be your new daddy! What if he wasn’t in the Thieves’ Guild, or you weren’t young enough for him to think you were cute? Once you got too big, he could have shot you or called the cops to do it!”

“And you got caught by a vampire hunter!” Remy grinned. “You were awful lucky that Whistler didn’t finish the job, Eric.”

Well, Blade couldn’t stay mad (worried) at Remy for that. Because before Whistler came along, all Eric Brooks had cared about was how long he’d gone without blood—and if he was caught in the middle of a meal, how fast he could run.

Frank still wasn’t drinking, eyeing the shadow-glass warily. Soon he put it back down, and then Blade had to laugh, the tightness in his chest easing up.

“Is Frank finally cracking jokes, Haint?” Gambit wondered. “Of course he wouldn’t do it when I can hear him.”

“I told you Frank don’t drink wine.” Blade shook his head. “He think he gonna break that thing.”

“Wine ain’t rocket science, Frank!” Remy said in the direction of the other glass, laughing slow and easy. “Just take your time with it. You already dead—it can’t hurt you.” He swirled his almost-broken glass before he drank again, but then he held it out towards Blade. “You want the rest, Eric? I been drinking enough.”

Well, now two people were drinking, even if one of them was dead and hesitant. With the rumble of no blood in Blade’s stomach, and with Gambit’s soul so open and hurting and melancholy, Blade was drawn to him and the offering-wine before he quite realized he was walking.

Frank’s wine tasted different from the calmer (distant) offerings Gambit had left for Matt Murdock and Matt-called-Daredevil. The smells of the sea and the sun faded fast into the spirit world, and in the sweet-sting of red wine, Blade saw flashes of the stories Gambit told about Remy, the kid with no parents and no last name.

Gambit hadn’t been lying about how small he’d been as a kid—because how do you grow without food?

Sometimes he stole from regular folks, and sometimes they stole from him. Remy didn’t seem unhappy, more resigned to the blistering Southern heat in the day, and the moist cold at night.

The street kids told each other stories about the shapes in the lake or in the bayou water, and spirits hiding in the concrete. A Black man called Mr. Osprey appeared if someone was hurt or wounded; sometimes he’d heal people or turn into his namesake on the search to heal them, but sometimes he’d lie down with the dying and let them pass, warm arms tight around stiffening flesh.

There was shockingly little fear or dread for the street kids. But why would they fear Osprey? He wasn’t violent or scary, just there. When one of Remy’s friends vanished in the water, when one got heat-stroke in the summer, and one got too cold when it rained, Osprey comforted the living as much as the dead, wiping tears on his shirt or letting people hug one of his lean black dogs with golden collars.

Now the teens and adults, they had a lot more fear of death, if not Osprey. They feared drugged food from false kindness, they feared getting hit by uncaring cars, and they feared either men or angels-that-looked-like-men. Some older folks called Osprey “The Man Who Comes To Judge.”

Blade didn’t know who Osprey was judging, but one time Remy and a handful of his friends were flat-out begging to be let into a shelter. Osprey’s black dogs were snarling out at the darkness around them, ringing around the kids’ small forms as their small hands pounded at the door.

Blade was glad that this memory ended when the door finally opened, even if baffled adults couldn’t hear the dogs and didn’t know why all these kids were so frantic and crying.

He didn’t want to see what violent men or violent angels that Osprey’s dogs were keeping at bay, but soon his glass was empty and his stomach demanded more, because he’d gone so long without blood or his serum to replace it.

No one had told Eric Brooks any stories, or shown him street-prayers in Los Angeles. No, Eric Brooks was what people told stories about. But something hurt him deep about how Remy-Before-LeBeau was just… blown around in all this shit, without even the excuse of being a mutant first.

“Why you calling Johnny an angel?” Blade wondered to his grown version of Remy, wiping his tired (hurting) eyes. “Wasn’t that the thing chasing you when you were a kid?”

“There’s angels all over the place, Eric. Osprey used to be one. They can help you or be mad at you, it’s a case-by-case thing.” Remy LeBeau, the man long out of the street life? He laughed, and he poured Blade more wine.

“These ain’t no angels.” Blade swigged from his glass of salt-and-sun. No, Gambit’s angels sounded like fairies—the kind from the old tales, the things that looked human but acted like monsters. “I don’t know what the street-folks be praying to in New Orleans, but they ain’t no goddamn angels.”

“Don’t nobody read the Bible in the Void?” Gambit chuckled. “Some of those got a lot more wings than Mr. Osprey does, Eric.”

“Why you so nice, boy?!” Blade exploded, his shoulders shaking and his chest hurting. “Why people made you sit through Mass before they let you eat, and you prayed to them wild bayou angels who’d kill you as soon as help you, and—and you ain’t fucking mad about it?!”

So he drained his glass again, but he spilled some on his shirt this time, and he cried without knowing why—or not for which reason. Because Frank Castle was dead and because Remy couldn’t eat before he at least pretended to be Catholic, because that roaring ache about both of them just won’t let up.

“Ooh, Frank’s wine be stronger on you than Matt’s stuff.” Remy pulled him into the chair. “We know him too well, I reckon.”

“At least people had a reason to treat me like shit! Because I drank their blood, so I scared them!” He tried to wipe his face, but he’d forgot about the wine on it, that damn ocean smell smearing red across one cheek. “You only got your powers after you left the streets! You weren’t no fucking monster, Remy! You were ten years old!”

“You and Frank gotta stop calling yourselves those names.” Remy wet a rag from the sink and wiped him off; the rag was cold and soothing, but his hand against Blade’s skin was hot. “Ain’t no reason I didn’t know my first daddy. Ain’t no reason people made a kid listen to folks telling tales about God for a cold sandwich. Might as well be mad that the lake is too big, or the summer’s too hot.”

Was this what being drunk was like? Blade thought people were happy about it. He got up on wobbling legs, struggling to remember which way his room was, but Remy caught up soon and he sat him back in the chair, chuckling.

“If you still hungry, I’ll give you another glass, Eric,” he said, pouring out two more drinks. “But I gotta cut you off soon if Frank’s wine don’t agree with you.”

So the ghost of Frank Castle nursed his own glass with Eric and Remy, until the sun came up.

Blade half-expected him to vanish at dawn, like the vampires he’d often hunted, but Frank stayed with them a long while after.

He clapped a hand on Johnny’s arm as he woke up complaining about a headache, and he read comics silently over Laura’s shoulder.

Sometimes Blade or Elektra would feel cold hands guiding them to hidden parts of Frank’s seemingly-endless arsenal.

Sometimes they’d see a tense shadow in one doorway or another, but that white skull on his chest was always there to let them know it was Frank Castle, warning his friends about trouble.

And Blade himself? He kept the Punisher’s empty gun, strapped in with his other weapons, oiled and technically working.

But he couldn’t make himself reload it, not even after cold hands showed him a loose floorboard that revealed yet more boxes of bullets.

“I know you got bullets damn near everywhere,Frank,” he said to the shadow of his friend. “It just… don’t feel right.”

—

Deadpool tightens his lips. “Is… is all the ghost-story business gonna be important?”

“Yes, Frank is important.” The Author assures him. “And you and Wolverine can’t die, which will also be important, but that’s more world-building than plot stuff.”

“Why is Gambit so pagan woo-woo when he’s supposed to be Catholic?”

“Deadpool, I JUST wrote an author’s note about homeless kids’ spirituality,” The Author reminds him, her face in her hand. “How can you get into that trendy Catholicism, without any parents to keep a house for you to park a car at, before you go to Sunday Mass and give up a chunk of your nonexistent income for donations? I don’t even know if Gambit got baptized, because it’s not like HE’D know! So now my boy Remy is just raw-dogging the spirit world.”

“I can see why you like Channing Tatum’s Gambit if you’re the worst at sexual metaphors,” he laments. “Wait! Why is Blade keeping the Punisher’s gun as a tragic keepsake?! Will he finally reload it for a jizz-inducing fight scene?! Ohhhhhhhh, what if he’s gonna pistol-whip someone? You gotta give me time to prep for that, baby girl!”

Chapter 3

As the hours drag on in the shed, the Resistance goes from resting to chafing. The wind dies down and the rain slows its pummeling of the concrete, and they’re just stuck in whatever shreds of light make it through the cloudy skies and boarded-up windows.

But it took them long enough to get in here, and that’s the only thing they can really do about the buwaya. Run and hide. The buwaya doesn’t just eat people, either, it eats “what can fit in its mouth.”

Where is that woman who told Blade what the buwaya was? Is she hiding like they are? He hopes she hasn’t gotten eaten—but he wouldn’t know how to call her on purpose.

Thank you for your concern, aswang, the Filipino woman tells him. I’ve been looking for you, but the buwaya are… DIFFICULT creatures.

Good to see you, Tita. There’s one problem down, so Blade shifts—against Elektra’s shoulder, it turns out, and then he freezes and pops away. “Sorry.”

“Eric, we have a lot more problems to deal with than personal space.” Again he can hear her smile. “But thank you.”

So Johnny—our friend—he was dead for a while, he tells the woman. The buwaya brought him back to life after eating his soul. If he lights up his fire, the buwaya comes over and starts asking us about his ‘kinsman.’ Is Johnny gonna die if we fight him?

Blade hates the thought of picking between Johnny Storm and a REAL fucking storm, but he needs to get that out of the way. (He is afraid that he will pick Johnny. Especially after he died already.)

Fear not for your friend, she assures him. Well, apart from the OBVIOUS reasons. But these buwaya are storms; they need not birth young, nor raise them. He must have been a man once—before Spain came, people would sacrifice one of their own to the buwaya for protection. If they are offered a human soul, so they should gain a human mind and heart, and become a true dragon. But, well… there are buwaya and there are buwaya.

They the same word, Tita, he points out.

That IS the problem, aswang, she tells him with a sigh. They didn’t always know which buwaya would answer—the creature, or the storm.

And they still got themselves killed? He wonders what kind of shit would be so bad it would make a man risk eating people and spirits like steak. Pinoys hate crocodiles now! The buwaya ain’t dragons or gods or nothing to them—they just dirty cops who kill you or take bribes! Ain’t nobody gonna tell us if they’re related to one!

CATHOLICS hate crocodiles now, the woman spits, and Blade winces in spite of himself—that name sounds like dirt in her mouth, but he can’t blame her for it.

Well, how do we find Tick-Tock’s kin, Tita? Gonna take a while to sort out those DNA tests.

Even if he cannot speak WELL, he can do it, she says. If you find someone who speaks to animals or at least a Tagalog, they’ll understand him better than I can.

Wait… you don’t understand him, Tita? Oh, this is a bad sign.

The buwaya are not gods themselves,she tells him. Gods get worshiped, and the buwaya care not whether mortals fear or love them. But Filipino magic is still stronger through blood ties. If you cannot find someone who speaks to the creatures of the wilds, then you MUST find a Tagalog.

Fuck. He hadn’t been in the Philippines too long, but he remembered what felt like myriad languages in the islands, and the lines of hatred between Tagalogs and Ilokanos and all those other peoples.

“What’s wrong?” Elektra’s voice grazes his ear, and when her hand presses on his shoulder, he realizes how tense he is.

“We gonna need a translator for Godzilla,” Blade tells her, with his opposite shoulder crunching against a soggy cardboard box. “I ain’t good enough at Tagalog to talk to him, Johnny don’t like hearing him, and the only Pinoy spirit I know just said she ain’t Tagalog.”

“Hoo.” There’s Gambit twisting open a flask, and Blade can make out the flick of his wet brown hair as he shakes his head. “I hope your buddy ain’t Visayan. Tick-Tock gonna be zooming after Visayans faster than he does with Johnny.” Silver glints as he holds it up, and Blade can smell sweet-and-sour palm wine. “You want some, Tita? It’s too warm, but it’s all I have right now.”

“Remy,” Blade sighs. “There’s a goddamn dragon next door. You can’t let spirits be riding you when Godzilla’s trying to eat everything that got two legs.”

Gambit’s spirit isn’t wide open, like it was for Frank Castle. But he might be remembering something about the mortal Filipinos he’s known, for a hot blast of sea-wind blows into the spirit-world, filled with the reek of dead bodies.

I suppose I’ll have some, the woman says with a sigh, and her shadow takes the shadow of Gambit’s flask. The buwaya’s almost full by now, aswang. If you go outside, he will not seek you out.

Blade frees his coat from wherever it got stuck, then figures out how to stretch without bumping too many things or people. How many souls does a buwaya need, Tita? He a big-ass motherfucker.

To eat? Not as many as you’d think, she says. Perhaps a dozen souls would keep him full for at least a few weeks. But the buwaya are not… MEASURED, as you’ve seen.

No, how measured is a creature that calls up storms? Blade hasn’t forgotten the sight of souls dripping purple from its jaws, or how its stray thunder slammed him into a car, or how Johnny and Remy were all but laid out from that same blast.

“Remy, how many Filipinos are in the Thieves’ Guild?” Elektra wonders.

“They ain’t just in the Guild, sha,” he says. “There’s a lot of Pinoys in New Orleans. The oldest families, their daddies were sailors on the Manila Galleons, and ain’t none of them gone back on the ships.” He shakes the flask, though he’s the only living person who drank from it. “Guess Tita’s done by now. Whoever wants some, go ahead.”

“You are always fucking drinking, Sweetness.” But Johnny takes it anyway. “Thanks, though.”

So the flask is passed around, because as much as they’d prefer food after a day of getting pulverized by a storm made flesh, alcohol is the next best thing.

Blade is the last to taste that milky white drink, for the smell of rancid-dead-bodies is mixing with the sweet warning of death-as-a-concept, and he drinks as little as he can manage.

“And that’s why I don’t give a fuck if white people think I’m Mexican,” a teenage girl with dark hair and dark skin told the younger Remy. “That’s what kept my Tatay Juan from getting caught.”

“Were folks blind back then?” Remy asked. “Filipinos don’t look like no Mexicans!”

Remy’s eyes were almost above the other boys’ heads, so he’d be close to his adult height, but his voice was still crackly. He had muscles and the ease of movement like Eric’s Remy, but he was so wiry and hard-edged that Eric thought his version could break this kid in half. And without the X-Men armor that Eric knew, a pretty but rail-thin boy almost seemed to vanish in the cluster of teens.

“The conquistadors ain’t blind, Remy, they just don’t care about the help,” she said. “‘Excuse me, have you seen a brown man with curly black hair?’ ‘Sir, this is New Orleans, they all over the city.’ ‘His name is Juan and he deserted our ship.’ ‘Bitch, this is New Orleans! There’s brown men with Spanish names all over the port! You ain’t finding this boy any time soon!’”

The other kids hooted at this story of freedom through tricking the rich people, but Remy didn’t laugh that long.

“Why all your folk deserting?” He asked. “Near all the Filipinos here came from sailors who didn’t want to sail no more. I thought y’all loved the water.”

“The water, sure! But the Spanish worked the galleon crews to death,” the Filipino girl said. “And the ones like Tatay Juan, they stepped on land and they couldn’t go back. There were plenty of jobs in New Orleans for dock workers. He just needed to lay low until they stopped looking for him.”

“But he ain’t got no people back home?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But half the crew jumped ship with Tatay Juan, so he wasn’t alone here.”

Through the chorus of teenage hurt and shock, Blade finally recognizes the look in the younger Remy’s eyes, and he wishes he didn’t.

It’s that wide, keen-edged grief that everyone’s seen too much on their older Gambit, when members of the Resistance kept dying. For Frank Castle, who never smiled, but who never strayed, either. For Matt Murdock and Matt-called-Daredevil, those two different versions of Elektra’s man. For Magneto with too many names, who Gambit used to fight against and ended up fighting alongside when both their worlds were locked up in the Void. For Johnny Storm, everyone’s dumbass little brother in a grown man’s body, and Gambit’s space-angel made of fire.

For Charles Xavier and Logan Howlett, a treacherous voice whispers in Blade’s mind.

Now, Remy-called-Gambit was a man grown, and he’d been fighting most of his life—it was a given that he felt grief. But Remy-before-Gambit? Blade doesn’t like seeing that tired old pain on a kid whose voice wasn’t done breaking yet.

But, well… Remy was homeless. He’d already lost friends and been comforted by a street-god of death, by the time he was ten.

“Tatay Juan wasn’t gambling on getting back home,” she said, and she pressed Remy’s shoulder. “It was either dying on the ocean soon, or dying here later. Sometimes you just gotta leave.”

Better to die free a day later than by the conquistador’s hand, the Filipino woman seethes.

Blade welcomes the interruption, though it stings him with how familiar this sentiment is. He’s seen it from Black Americans dealing with America, and the humans-turned-vampires who decided to walk into the sun for the last time.

He doesn’t want to drink more of Gambit’s memories, or think about the deaths of Laura’s Charles and Laura’s Logan. The palm wine’s taken the edge off his hunger, so he hands the flask back to Johnny.

Remy, though, he turns his head at the same time Elektra does. “You wasn’t kidding about needing a translator, Monsieur Haint. I hope Tita ain’t mad at me more than Tick-Tock is.”

“Boy, your Cajun ass got a lot of nerve saying you can’t understand someone’s accent!” Blade retorts, but now Elektra puts a hand on his shoulder.

“I hear her, too,” Elektra says. “We just can’t understand her.”

“She been talking to me since that goddamn lizard came around!” Blade reminds them, but now the dread is creeping into the back of his mind, like the wind through the door.

Turns out Tick-Tock and the spirit aren’t speaking English, but something about his vampirism must be helping him out.

And only him.

Great news, he thinks, and his elbow clacks against something wood. Great fucking news.

—

Deadpool is watching from the other side of the Fourth Wall. “Ooh! Is the girl from Gambit’s high school going to be important?”

“Deadpool, I’m eating,” the Author says through a mouthful of spaghetti. The room around her is more defined and better-lit now, even if it’s just a worn-out couch and a folding table for her laptop. “Okay, Blade is the only one who’s interacted with ANY Filipinos that I know about, and Gambit must know SOME Filipinos because he grew up in New Orleans, so this is gonna be important for my girl with shitty powers! And yeah, Gambit’s friend is in the Thieves’ Guild, since I planned that part anyway.”

“Six degrees of separation from Channing Tatum?” Deadpool wonders. “How many Filipinos are even in New Orleans?”

“A FUCKING LOT, WADE,” she says after shoving the last of the spaghetti into her mouth, and the near-empty bowl clacks down on her desk. “Guess why I wrote about Gambit’s flashback about the Manila Galleon trade route? Where half the sailors jumped ship the moment they reached New Orleans, a port city?”

“So the sailor’s descendant is in the Thieves’ Guild? Aren’t you worried about bad stereotypes?”

“I’ll have more than one Filipino in the cast, Deadpool,” she assures him, scraping the bowl. “And if you count the Pinoy storm-spirit and the Pinoy goddess, I have three already!”

“You’re not sounding NOT autistic right now, baby girl.”

“Tell that to the website who told me to MEDITATE my shitty memory into being better!” she snaps, but it’s not at him. “Anyway, I’d prefer to onboard my Pinoy characters into the Marvel corporatefamily with something a LITTLE more solid than Blade’s one-off adventure and implied details about Gambit’s hometown, but it’s like Louisiana wants me to come visit.”

“Are… are you gonna go?”

“I would LOVE to! Cajun food is great!” She says. “But I don’t have ‘take a trip to Louisiana’ money. All I got is fanfiction and the Hadestown soundtrack.”

“The Greek mythology musical? Is… is Greek mythology coming into the story?”

“IT’S BASED OFF NEW ORLEANS JAZZ AND ELEKTRA IS GREEK, MOTHERFUCKERS!” The Author crows. “Also, remember to go to Vanessa’s place when—”

“Sweet Marvel Jesus! The plot moves on this end!” Deadpool heads to the closet, while the Author squeaks and tries to stop him.

“No, Wade! THE PLOT’S NOT MOVING YET!” Her arms go through him as he pulls on his suit. “It’s still fucking FLOODED!”

Unfortunately, ten years of superhero experience has made Wade Wilson frighteningly fast at gearing up (especially since he can just heal if he dislocates something). He’s grabbed his keys, a couple of guns, and Baby Knife, and then he’s out the door and sloshing down the driveway to his car.

“WAAAAAADE!” The Author, gripping her temples, steps through the wall, and she hopes someone RESPONSIBLE hears her: “Hey! Wade is going to Vanessa’s place too early! Logan, can you hear me?! It’s not serious, but cars do not like all this water!”

None of them stir from their rooms.

“LAURA?!” She tries to kick at the wall, but her leg just goes through it.

Mary Puppins wakes up at the strange voice, trotting down the hallway and sniffing the Author’s shin.

“Of course it’s the one who weighs fifteen pounds,” the Author tells her with a groan. “But your little suit is not rated for severe weather, honey.”

She growls, and the Author winces.

“Oh, that was graphic. Honestly, I don’t know what I expected from someone who lives with Deadpool, but… he’s so NICE to you.”

Mary sits down, and her sideways tongue slobbers out when the Author sits down and pets her.

“So I learned today: Don’t tell that idiot Wade any plot-sensitive stuff. Or keep it short because we all suspect he’s ADHD, so I need to finish BEFORE that fucker leaps to conclusions.”

Mary whines.

“That’s actually sweet!” The Author grins and scratches one of the dog’s bald ears. “All right, babe, keep that energy when everyone ELSE starts calling him a dumbass.”

Appeased, Mary heads out the back door.

“Where are you going?!” The Author tries to scoop her up out of instinct, but again her hands go through Mary. “Goddamn it, BOTH of you can’t follow instructions!”

Dogpool is suddenly suited up with goggles, her jacket, and her booties. She barks and follows the wake of Wade’s car.

“OH, FUCK YOU TOO, CUNT!” The Author starts running after her.

—

Back in the shed, there’s more light, and the rain has slowed down to a drizzle.

“All right,” Blade says. “Godzilla is full by now. We can head out and start running again.”

“Running where?” Johnny points out.

“I hope we find a place with a working lock this time.” He takes the buntot-pagi out of the lock, stows it in a spare holster, and opens the creaking door.

The sunlight almost hurts after being in the dark for so long, but after being trapped in the shed, the cool air and the smell of the rain blows soft on their faces and into their chests.

Johnny smiles as if the wind is nothing on all that bare skin—or maybe he does feel it, because now he coils up with his hands trailing smoke on the door-frame.

Until Gambit rams into him, arms wrapped solid around his torso. “JOHNNY!”

“WHAT THE FUCK?!”

“Don’t you flame on right now, or Tick-Tock’s gonna find us!” Gambit refuses to let go until Johnny’s hands stop smoking.

“Oh!” He remembers, so his hands come away, flaking ash and paint chips. “Thanks, Sweetness. Damn it, are we really just running now? The normal way?”

“Well, unless you got keys for a getaway car hiding in all three feet of your suit? Yes, we are.” Elektra claps his shoulder.

“Fiiiiiiiiiiiiine.”

And so they start running.

Well, jogging—after all, they’re still tired and wet and hurt.

Plus, it’s not like they know where another abandoned house is yet.

—

On Deadpool’s premature quest, the streets are underwater, and since the ground isn’t acting right, he nearly rear-ends a stalled car.

“EXCUSE ME?” He honks, but the driver won’t move. He puts the car in park and gets out Baby Knife. “Bitch, I’m Marvel Jesus, and I need to rescue—owwww! What the fuck?!”

His feet are tingling and burning now that he’s close to the other car, and it would probably be a lot worse without his healing factor.

The driver is dead, but there’s no blood on him—just red lacy lines, and the blue tint of death on his skin. Across the street is what killed him: A downed and sparking power line.

“Oh! Baby girl asked medical students what happens with a giant malfunctioning pole that you should absolutely NOT TOUCH.” Wade winces and gets back in the car.

“Wade, you stupid bitch!” The Author appears next to him in the passenger’s seat. “This scene was supposed to be where the Resistance found out that the pangil ng kidlat protects you from lightning, but only one person can wear it. LUCKY FOR THEM, Gambit lives with a woman who makes storms, so he knows how to deal with charged ground! Now I gotta move that somewhere else, because YOU were supposed to stay home, and YOU can’t die!”

“But it still hurttttttttts,” Deadpool whines.

“Just go to Vanessa’s place.” The Author rubs her temples.

Mary Puppins barks from the backseat.

“My ray of sunshine!” Wade checks behind him and strains to grab her, with the car starting to jitter as it veers too far to the side.

“WADE, THE ROAD! LOOK AT THE ROAD!”

“Nobody can see the road, baby girl! You’re the one who made it rain in the worst way ever!” He retorts, and then settles Mary on his lap. “Beloved, how did you follow your dear papa?”

“Remember that she’s YOU,” the Author tells him.

—

In the wake of the buwaya’s rampage, the streets look as shitty as the Resistance feels.

They’ve been scoping out cars in case someone left their keys inside, but there’s been no luck. And with their latest target being a police car, they don’t want to try it. Even considering that nobody will come out if the alarm gets set off, that shit is LOUD. They’ve had enough of the rain, the wind, and a storm-spirit’s questions battering their ears.

“What’s this?” Gambit bends down and spots the sticker of a long white skull on the cop car’s window. “Now, what the hell. Why they put Frank’s skull on this bitch?”

This is no sign from the Punisher—just a sticker in the worst place possible. Soon, Eric and Elektra can feel the sudden, white-hot rage boiling off of Frank Castle’s ghost.

“I’ve seen cops with Punisher stuff,” Blade muses. “Some of them got a hard-on for what he does.”

“Well, Frank ain’t no cop-lover.” Gambit seethes. “And they don’t like me too much, neither!”

He drinks from his flask of palm wine again before hefting his staff like a spear: “Frank! I ain’t stole a car in a hot minute, but I’m getting back in the business for you!” He plunges it into the window.

In the shock of breaking glass, Frank’s spirit cools down—and Blade thinks he hears someone chuckle, as Gambit opens the door and sweeps out the shards with the offending sticker’s pieces.

“Time for a quick charge.” He flicks out a playing card from his sleeves, grins, and tears it in half. “Gonna be rough this way, but I ain’t sorry to make the police carpool for a while.”

“How you gonna start the car with no key?” Blade retorts.

He waves them off. “Everyone put your seat-belts on. Make sure it’s on park.”

After they’re in, the driver’s door stays open for him, and the parking brake is firmly set—Gambit double-checks through the window before he even opens the hood—he puts one half-card each on the battery terminals, and charges them up with two fingers.

In the wash of purple light, the card pieces don’t explode like usual—they sink into the battery instead, popping so many sparks that they rain onto the wet ground. And soon after Gambit thumps the car hood down, the engine all but booms, like a just-wakened beast.

“You said you were in the Thieves’ Guild! Not The Fast and the Furious!” Elektra accuses him from the backseat, already clutching the passenger handles.

“And we had more than a few car specialists, sha!” Gambit laughs as he jumps through the driver’s door and clips himself in.

“What the hell did you do to this thing, Remy?!” Blade winces as Gambit floors the gas pedal, and the car blasts off with a screech of tires.

He can smell everyone’s blood pressure spiking up against the roof as they roar down the street.

Except for Remy.

That damn boy just laughs.

—

“Oh, Gambit’s so good at stealing cars,” Deadpool says on his half of the traveling montage. “Do you have prior experience in grand theft auto, baby girl?”

“No, this is boring,” she admits. “My sister had a beater that just FAINTED if you looked at it wrong, so she didn’t want to keep calling her insurance for help.”

“I see we’re finally getting some cars on this road trip!” He says. “Also, why does Gambit hate cops?”

“I don’t know, why do you think a HOMELESS KID that grew up into a THIEF might not like law enforcement?” The Author retorts. “Wade Wilson, the world’s dumbest seer.”

“I’M A SEER?!” He puts his hands to his mouth. “Is that how the Fourth Wall manifests here?!”

“Yeah, there’s a theme about how seeing other worlds is intertwined with being crazy or god-touched, HINT-HINT,” she says. “Oh shit, Wade—”

“I’m just so touched that you would give Marvel Jesus, your lord and savior, even more power—”

“WADE! LEFT! GO LEFT!”

“Sorry!” He brakes and hauls at the steering wheel, curving far too slow before they hit a streetlight—and soon after that, a smoking police car nearly hits them.

“Damn it, we’re early!” The Author huffs. “Wade, play nice with everyone.”

The car stops, and a man in a trashed blue bodysuit heads over. “We’re so sorry, are you hurt—oh, fuck you, Deadpool!”

“Hey!” Deadpool holds up Mary Puppins. “We had a baby on board, least-popular Chris Evans!”

“Sure, dick for brains, I look like Captain America because I’m blonde!”

“What you doing all prettied up like that?” Gambit asks. “We got a storm spirit on the loose! Ain’t nobody fighting him!”

“I was on a quest!” Deadpool insists. “But in my magnanimity as Marvel Jesus, I shall concede—GET IN! GET IN MY CAR! RIGHT NOW!”

The smoke from the police car’s engine is gushing thick and black, with flames threatening to burst through the gaps in the hood. Once everyone’s in his own car, Deadpool rams the gas pedal again, watching as the smoking cop car gets smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror.

When they’re halfway down the block, it explodes in purple-toned mist.

“I didn’t do too bad for being out of practice,” Gambit chuckles. “We got at least five miles!”

“FIVE miles is good for your car-jumping?” Johnny wonders.

“It ain’t for cruising, angel, it’s for getting out of sight fast,” Gambit says. “Anyhow, we met up with a friend! We don’t gotta break into no buildings for the time being.”

“I’m a friend?!” Deadpool asks. “Gambit, would that make me, perhaps… an X-Man?!”

“You only a friend because Johnny happens to be alive again,” Gambit warns.

“After your dumb ass got him skinned, he got ate by that storm spirit up there,” Blade says, pointing up to the car roof.

“Am… am I going to be on probation for the X-Men—”

“Boy, Charles ain’t here right now! Don’t ask me nothing about it!” Gambit snaps.

“Oh, no! You and Logan keep talking about Charles Xavier’s absence from the story!” He checks the back seat, where the Author fumes. “Why is he so mean?!”

“Well, I believe in second chances, but I ain’t giving you no references just yet,” Gambit tells him.

“Is this going to be a motif, baby girl?!” Deadpool asks.

“God, he’s a dog parent,” Elektra says. “Deadpool. Give me the dog. You are DRIVING.”

—

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.

--

Chapter 2

In the stomach of the buwaya, the former Resistance members are NOT having a good time. They’re being blown around in a tide without an ocean, and they barely know which way is up—the water is dark, but full of the stars in its mouth. There’s lights above them, lights reflected in the water, and lights reflected so far beneath them—it feels more like space than an earthly sea.

“Johnny!” Elektra calls. “Do you remember getting digested?!”

“Uhhhhh… maybe?!” 

“The fuck you mean, ‘maybe?!’” Blade snaps. “Were fire-powers too spicy for this thing?!”

“I just got sloshed around like now!” Johnny hangs on to one of Elektra’s sais. “Like, he chomped me, I got my body back in here, and it’s not like he shit me out OR threw me up! I mostly just—fell?!”

“Well, that’s something!” Blade wants to put away his buntot-pagi sword, but he can’t untie the sheath from his leg, and he doesn’t feel like accidentally stabbing someone. The best he can do is loop the cord around his wrist and try to keep it pointed away from the others.

But the stingray’s barb in the hilt is uncomfortably hot, and the wave-tempered steel is turning red from rust: Another worrying sign that this creature (place?!) is a capital S-Spirit, unbound to regular rules.

“Don’t none of y’all talk about Johnny not knowing what’s in Tick-Tock’s stomach!” Gambit tells them. “This thing ain’t fucking right!”

“The hell it’s not!” Blade admits. He hates the weirder spirits. He hates these not-beasts and their not-bodies and their not-biological urges—

So all they can do is keep clutching anyone else’s clothes-weapons-arms as needed, hoping that they get through this in one piece: Like they did outside of the creature.

Presently the tides calm down. Now the sun cuts through the darkness, painfully bright and confusing after being stuck in the stars, and the somewhat drier air is too cold against Blade’s face and hands.

As Johnny told them, they fall back to earth in a mess of jumbled limbs and soggy clothes, and they toss their loose weapons away before someone ends up impaled.

They hit the sidewalk without too much pain, skidding through the puddles. After the mess is sorted out, again it’s gone quiet, and they move with the unspoken agreement to be careful: They don’t see their accidental ride anywhere.

Yet.

Blade pulls himself up by a street-lamp and hunts for where he saw the buntot-pagi sword land.

“That motherfucking lizard.” He seethes when he finds it, covered in rust as he feared. “Talking about souls all day, and then it ate my goddamn SWORD.”

The rust is thick, but at least it seems loose, with no pits or cracks in the blade that he can see. The wooden half of the hilt has turned into pale driftwood, but the stingray barb is curiously white against the exhausted strips of sharkskin. Blade tries to tighten the wrapping, but unless he wants to use the sword’s bare tang at this point, the barb will be falling out the moment he lets go.

The problems themselves aren’t too bad: He COULD get this sword back in shape pretty quickly… assuming he COULD get home to his supplies (and his swordsmith). But this place is too cold and gray to be Los Angeles. The signs are in English, at least, but that could still mean at least a few countries—

“Is this New York?!” Elektra asks, and Blade’s fists curl up tight.

“Next time I see any goddamn reptile that looks like cousins to a crocodile, I’m GRILLING that fucker.” He rams the buntot-pagi sword into its sheath, stalking over the rust that flakes out.

“But you can’t eat food,” Elektra points out while she grabs her own sais.

“I can, I just don’t care about it.” Except for offerings, that is.

Something glitters on the ground near Elektra: The pangil is as untouched as the stingray’s barb.

“So the buwaya likes jewelry or something?” She picks it up and loops it back onto her neck.

“The sword: Is from civilization,” Blade grouses. “The stingray tail: Is a stingray tail. The pangil: Is made from lightning.”

“Do we have everything?” Johnny asks. “Godzilla’s not going to be far.”

“Uh-oh.” Elektra closes her eyes hard and rubs her temples. “Johnny? Where… was your suit made?”

“What’s wrong?” 

“Angel, you gotta wait before asking US if we got everything.” Gambit taps Johnny’s bare shoulder.

“SHIT.” Johnny scans what’s left of his bodysuit: Now his sleeves and chest are in chunks, and whole patches of the legs are gone. Swathes of Johnny’s skin crisscross between the pieces. “The suit has lasted twenty fucking years! I don’t even know if Reed and Sue are in this world to make me a spare!”

Blade thanks whoever’s up there for leaving Johnny just enough coverage to hide everything important, because even without getting busted for indecency, he’ll run through clothes like… well, wildfire.

After the first week in the Void, they’d stopped giving Johnny clothes and just tossed him scraps of cloth and leather. Sure, he looked like a Mad Max extra, but covering up the bodysuit really helped avoid all the people who wanted to kill him.

Now, if only Johnny had the patience to grow a proper beard instead of shaving the minute his stubble came up, even the Resistance wouldn’t recognize him.

“You can’t be walking in the rain like that.” Gambit takes off his coat.

“Sweetness, I’m from New York! You’re cold when it’s less than seventy degrees! Flame on!” Johnny flies up to check for the buwaya.

But he clutches his ears against something they can’t hear yet, cuts the heat, and speeds right back down like a paratrooper.

“GO-GO-GO!” He grabs Gambit’s hand and starts bolting, the smoke trailing away from their wrists.

But they make sure to let Elektra and Blade get ahead of them, as the slightly more normal (and slightly older) members. How quickly they’ve all fallen back into old habits.

(Blade will miss it—again—whenever he gets back home.)

The buwaya roars at a distance, and the clouds start to roll in again. “YOU HOLD THE SUN?! ARE YOU MY KINSMAN?!”

“If he ate you already, why he so mad at you now?!” Gambit wonders as lightning flashes in the still-clear skies. “Tick-Tock sure don’t like his kin for a Pinoy!”

“Sounds right to me!” Elektra retorts. “Filipinos start family drama over all sorts of shit!”

“Maybe he likes Johnny too much!” Blade says. “What if he eats fire for dessert?!”

—

There are stories in the Philippines about how the moon lost its siblings. There used to be seven of them in the old days, lighting up the sky like a giant’s gleaming necklace, until a dragon saw them—either from the depths of the ocean, or the unlit void up above.

Laho and the Bakunawa are its most common names. Some may call it a naga or Rahu, but it is not known whether the Indian beasts replaced their local cousins, or if they only changed names.

The dragon, like so much of the world, thought that the seven moons were the most beautiful things it ever saw—but it wasn’t a creature of reason, so this only meant it got hungry.

And one glittering night, it leapt from the sea or its sky-home, and it snapped the closest moon in its jaws, with mortals shrieking in grief and horror.

—

Like a fucking crocodile, Blade realizes as they flee, with the videos of tourists feeding crocs and gators from boats flashing through his mind. After I grill that bastard reptile, I’m putting his head on my wall!

—

Night after night the dragon sprang from the darkness and it swallowed another moon whole, and when only one moon was left, we were frightened of losing our last proper light—for the stars, though much loved in their own way, are too small and too scattered to do so.

The villagers stayed up waiting past sundown for the creature again, shivering with pots and weapons and their loudest drums and gongs in wait.

Soon its great head breached the quiet of night again.

The villagers wailed and shrieked, and they beat weapons or instruments as hard as they could. As the great serpent tried to clamp its jaws around our last lonely moon, the ear-splitting racket startled it into spitting the moon out and fleeing.

And when the moon or the sun started to darken or turn strange colors, the ancestors thought their old enemy had seen the spheres’ beauty, and wished to devour them again. So they’d bring out their noise-makers and scare it off again.

—

In the streets, bystanders soon realize that the drenched strangers are running from SOMETHING, and as the buwaya’s bulk looms behind them, people shriek down the sidewalk and clear their path.

But this beast isn’t looking for the moon or the sun: It wants people.

Cars speed off. The buwaya casts no shadow as its neck-spikes shoot up—not a proper one, anyway, for the dark is shot with blue webs of light, the kind that Blade’s seen in aquariums.

“SOULS!” It bellows, towering over fleeing prey, and its raging feet crack down on the trunks of some unfortunate parked cars. “HUMANNNN! SOULLLLLS!”

Oh shit, not again.

“Get all these fuckers inside!” Blade yells to the other three, and so the Resistance members split into pairs along the sidewalk: One person yanks doors open, and the second starts shoving people through.

“INSIDE!” “GET INDOORS!” “LOCK UP!”

Luckily, the message spreads, and the crowds along the streets start cramming themselves through any opening they can.

They don’t know if they can help everyone get inside, but they have to try.

“KINSMAN!” The buwaya stops gaining on them, now: Instead it starts evaporating in a burst of blues and grays, swirling around and around. “WHERE IS MY KINSMAN?!”

The Resistance flinches and staggers on painful legs as the buwaya lifts up, with a chorus of wails from the civilians.

If the buwaya’s acting like a storm, this is from the air pressure dropping. Their joints and ears are popping now, and before the light starts to hurt, Blade smells FEAR coming from the other Resistance members.

When the storm-spirit lifts up to the dark clouds of the other storm above, their meeting makes the sky pulse blue. The smell of ozone, like wires burning, fills Blade’s nose before the concrete gets bit by snarling blue lightning—and too-close thunder BOOMS just a few yards behind his feet, so loud that it feels like his skull will split.

He’s blown sideways against a shaking car, scraping wet gloves around the door’s mirror. As his eyes well up from the wash of light and the shriek in his overloaded ears makes him dizzy, Blade realizes now why ancient people thought lightning was a god.

And he wasn’t even hit properly.

Blade limps around for the other Resistance members, but now the stench of fear surges from the crowd just as he spots the flutter of Gambit’s brown coat.

“No, no—Gambit!” Blade runs even with his knees and joints screaming. If they turn into a mob and start stampeding, they’ll run right over him—

And he knows Gambit's close, but he can't fucking SEE where he's going, so he tries to track Gambit’s scent down the battered street. Soon his healing kicks in and the ringing in his ears smooths out to a high-pitched hum; through the fleeing masses and the green smoke swimming in his vision, Gambit's curled up by what used to be a streetlight, mouth tight as he clutches his ears.

“GAMBIT?!” Blade still can’t see past the dark shapes of his own hands, but even if the streetlight didn’t fall on Gambit, nothing looks good, either: Gambit’s nose and ears are dripping blood onto the slicked leather of his cowl. “COME ON!”

Gambit’s mouth moves, but it’s cut short by coughing, with the nosebleed draining into his throat. And for a couple of terrible seconds, Blade can’t break the man’s pained, shaking hold on his own ears.

“REMY!” If Blade were younger, he could have lifted Gambit in a fireman’s carry (could have made him let go), but that wears him out fast now. “GET UP!”

So now he’s got to pull the Cajun’s heavy arm across his shoulders and drag him. And his ears and his eyes and his back still hurt—

Elektra doesn’t fare any better with Johnny, hunched under his dizzy form. “Oh, we are waaaaay too old for boot camp, Eric!”

Blade hates it when Gambit can’t move. The man is always in control—he is always being still or moving, as smooth as a breeze. Until something else makes him stop, and that’s usually when Blade is forced to remember how goddamn big Gambit is.

Blade is no lightweight even now, but Gambit is heavier and younger. When they knock each other’s legs, Gambit’s silver boots are pushing him any which way. When Gambit stops to cough the nosebleed out again, that iron arm jerks across Blade’s neck and he’s forced to stop. Because Gambit can’t control where his weight’s going, and if they both go down, Blade doesn’t know if he can pick him up again.

But how big are people compared to a storm?

Welcome to girl world, Eric! Elektra tells him in his mind, for she must have heard his thoughts—it’s not like anyone can hear REGULAR voices right now. A lot of guys don’t like it when you remind them that someone will eventually be stronger than you!

Young guys, I bet! Young office workers or gym rats, too, whose only fights are against women with no training or drunk men in bars.

And suddenly they both remember Frank Castle.

“Civilians don’t know shit about fighting,” Frank mused. “I was in Delta Force before I crossed over to the FBI. They both love to poach from the other side when you work for bosses that want people dead. My friend Dolph told me once that a lot of wannabe generals bragged about hitting their wives and kids, and then they’d shake in their boots once he walked up. He would have given Remy a hard time—six foot and five inches, and his retired weight was two hundred pounds. I would not fight that man if he was thirty years old and however many pounds heavier.”

“You love to hear wife-beaters get thrashed,” Elektra sighed.

“He said it was less beating them up and more making them lose control. Most women recruits, when you pin them or lift them up? They start kicking and biting. They already know most men are bigger than most women. But a lot of men recruits, they’d just panic when Dolph did it.”

“They don’t like it when someone can fight back,” Gambit nodded. “When I was in New Orleans—”

“Aw fuck!” Johnny got up. “Let me know when he’s done.”

“Ain’t nothing too scary for you, angel! I was ten!”

“When you were ten, you had no parents!” Johnny retorted, but at least he sat back down. “I swear to God, none of your stories about fucking N’arlins end well!”

“Oh! Johnny is mad if he’s trying to speak Cajun!” Elektra noted with a grin.

“I’ll keep things PG-13 for our sensitive boy Johnny,” Remy laughed. “Anyhow, I was smaller than Laura when I was ten. Other street boys used to whoop me.”

“What did you do to them?” Laura asked. “Did you have your powers?”

“They showed up when I was thirteen, little niece. And I didn’t have to do anything, so long as I was nearby,” Gambit admitted. “Street kids, some of them just be mad all the time. Or they think they are, but they hurting instead. Kids get mean as fuck, but they don’t know any better. Ten years later, that was after I got adopted and took up dancing, and by then I was a foot taller, too. Ain’t nobody recognized me when I got back—the slowest one took damn near half an hour—but once I said I was Remy the homeless kid, all them boys would flinch. And I be like, ‘You think I’m holding a grudge about kids scrapping? Just don’t start nothing again and I won’t remember nothing.’”

“So it was like the lab?” Laura was born in what seemed like the opposite of the streets—a sterile and unfeeling lab, where mutant kids were birthed by unknown Mexican women—but what they’d heard of that place was never good. “We didn’t fight each other, but all the scientists did was tell us to fight other people.”

“Just some smart-ass prison guards.” Gambit had wrapped a long arm around her. “Not quite like the streets, but a lot of us end up in prison. You ain’t even met your daddy until you were eleven.”

Now, nobody liked hearing about Gambit’s and Laura’s shitty childhoods, and by extension the ways that mutants were treated in their worlds.

But Blade had remembered being thirteen and homeless himself, and how he’d fed on homeless humans to soothe his thirst for blood until Abraham Whistler came along.

He and Gambit, they’d grown up too similar for comfort.

And he wondered how the fuck Gambit ended up so nice.

—

“Why are you the only one who can hear, woman?!” Blade notices in the present day, after Elektra’s caught up with him: There are no red lines washing off her face in the rain, and while her heart is battering hard inside her ribs and her joints hurt like his own, there’s no ear-ringing or headaches. “At least I had to heal up first!”

“Either because I died, or because you gave me the pangil!” Elektra skids into a “crack” on the sidewalk that splashes her shins and Johnny’s unsteady ankles. “But you tell me! You’re the only one who’s fought Filipino spirits here!”

“Twice! I fought them twice!” Blade sloshes down there himself. “You know who we could use right now? Frank!”

“Another fifty-year-old?!” Elektra retorts. “Frank didn’t even have powers!”

“Sure, but get the three of us together, shave off a few years for our good days, and we all make one damn good thirty-year-old!”

—

“Dolph didn’t really say the other part,” Frank told them another day, over what passed for a meal—a whole box of Vienna Sausage cans. “It was more like you noticed patterns. In Delta Force, people will look the other way if you disobey orders for a good reason, but when Dolph went on a mission, he just clammed up and worked with anyone around. Didn’t matter if he liked them. You think soldiers can pick who they’re deployed with, like fantasy football? We got three heroes who are pushing retirement, a blind hero pushing retirement,Mr. Zippo Lighter, a dancer with a gambling problem, and a teenager with a bad manicure. Normies would throw a fit if all they had was us.”

“Normies ain’t sent to the Void, Frank,” Gambit laughed and upended his can before throwing it in the garbage. “Not on purpose, anyway. The Time Agents put our worlds in storage and dropped us off before we had time to finish cooking beignets. How many guns you got when you doing house chores?”

“You complain that I bring guns to the laundromat,” and Frank rolled his eyes, “but guess who’s all happy to use them?”

“Gotta keep that punk-ass dryer from stealing your socks,” Johnny cracked.

Blade tries not to remember how everyone had laughed or at least smiled except Frank, perpetually weary. If Blade thought he was serious, at least he managed a couple of jokes now and then.

That man never laughed, except in memories with his family. But the ghosts of his wife and son, they’d follow Frank around when Laura read comics with Gambit about himself. They came to Frank when Elektra and another Daredevil reunited (and Blade especially couldn’t tell her anything then), and Blade had seen-felt them waiting by Frank’s room after that Daredevil died (because how many people did Elektra need to lose?).

“Dolph told me at the end of the day, you gotta pick between fighting alone and fighting with someone else. ANYONE else.”

When Frank had died fighting Cassandra Nova, that was the first and last time Blade saw him smile.

—

“Frank!” Blade tried to stop the blood coming from the Punisher’s ribs, but the wound was too big and his hands got slippery. “We told you not to fight that bitch! You got guns and trauma! She got psychic powers to end everyone who’s not her fucking lackeys!”

“I have a lot of guns,” Frank insisted, mouth bloody. “And I got you all, too.”

“You suicidal dumbass!”

The ghost of Maria Castle appeared, with her bright blonde ponytail and her soft pastel clothes. But there were laugh lines on her face now, and white strands mixing with the blonde, matching up with Frank’s graying black hair and too-gaunt cheeks.

“Stay out of this, woman! You dead already!” He waved at her blindly, like she was a stray cat, though it was never a good sign for a ghost to get old.

“I’m here for my husband, not his friend.” She smiled at him, and now came the piercing, desperate fear in Blade’s chest.

Ghosts didn’t talk to him—they just ran through memories! But she knew he was here, and she knew Frank was hurt—

“Frank don’t have friends no more! Just memories of friends!” And he was the only one here, anyway.

“Maria?” Frank asked hoarsely. “You—you told me to stop the first time.”

“To be fair… someone else did it now.” Maria sat down on the other side and took one of his shaky hands. “I’m not arguing with a technicality. I think you’ve already seen enough.”

“Dad!” Will Castle arrived, too, a young man with brunette hair. “Come on!”

“Will.” And now Frank was crying. “You grew up?”

Blade saw a flicker of those two lying limp on what looked like a wooden bridge: Will Castle had been a blonde little boy when he died, eight or ten years old—so much smaller than either of his parents.

“Boy, leave him alone!” Sure, Blade knew what was happening—he just didn’t like it.

This sour motherfucker was happy. Ghosts were talking to the living, not just flicking through memories. Too much blood coated the skull on Frank’s worn Kevlar vest, the aroma metallic and wild, and it made Blade’s vampire instincts scream for that thick pool of red—

“Frank!” Blade pleaded. “Get up! You been shot plenty of times!”

“My—my friends—” Frank shook now, wide-eyed and pale from lack of blood, but still he tried to reload his skull-headed gun. “They’re in trouble.”

“It’s okay,” she told him. “They’re just like you, honey. Tough as nails. They’ll get through this.”

And for one terrible, chest-squeezing second, Blade wanted to turn Frank into a vampire.

But the scent of death loomed over Frank now. He’d always smelled like he had one foot in the grave, and now it was all but swallowing him whole. His whole family died from the mob, after all, and the only thing he had left was killing criminals.

Blade smelled saltwater and hot sand in Frank’s memory of Florida. The younger Frank had jet-black hair and muscles for days, unhidden by his swim trunks. And he was so very happy, roaming the beach with his family…

“Come and rest, Frank.” Maria nestled her head on Frank’s bloody chest, her silhouette bursting yellow against the bone-white skull of the Punisher.

So Frank Castle finally went to sleep and he dropped that unloaded gun, his red smile all but glowing.

Laura had cried when she found Blade still there, hunched mute over Frank’s body, with the gun clenched in one hand.

There had been no time to bury him. There rarely was in the Void, not with so many threats from so many worlds, and Cassandra Nova on the rampage.

After the frantic run home, Remy, Elektra, and Johnny drank warm whiskey and flat beer for most of the night, bloodshot eyes and hushed voices.

Their drinks smelled like loss and the aching crush of memories, whirling around the empty chair where Frank should have been.

Laura could get drunk,but she didn’t stay that way for long unless she chugged the strongest liquor she could find.

Remy had offered Blade a bottle of beer, but still unused to human food, he’d just stayed with them and let them talk or stay quiet as needed.

—

In New York City, struggling under the weight of their heavier, younger friends, Eric and Elektra trek around clustered rubble. They tiptoe around oil slicks, chunks of concrete or metal from the wounded streets, and the torn-up bodies with death’s smell hanging all over them.

For Blade, death is heady and sweet—like too much cologne, or enough candy to make adults gag. It’s different from the physical stuff happening to your body—death-as-a-concept seems more like a place you can go to or not, because some people die of a broken heart and others just won’t stay dead, not even after getting beat so bad that Blade himself would have hated it.

He often wonders what made Elektra come back from a chest-stab, when Frank was always yearning to leave. Only the scar hiding under her vest and that faded but sickly-sweet scent of death would let people know how Elektra wasn’t quite normal anymore.

“SOULS!” The buwaya screams from the pouring clouds. Without even the semblance of a body this time, it’s more terrifying than it was in Los Angeles. “HUMANNNNNN! SOULLLLLLS!”

—

“Jesus Christ! This is Jurassic Park, not a superhero movie!” Deadpool says to the Author at home, finishing off his lunch. (His home… with locked doors and closed windows.) “Nature finds a way… to eat Johnny Storm? He wasn’t my favorite, but that doesn’t mean I wanted him to die the first time!”

“He’s talking about fanfiction again.” Logan turns the TV on, rubbing his temple. “Time to ride this one out, Laura.”

“He smells different,” Laura warns him, and now Logan has to look back at Wade.

Well… Vanessa said that things happen after Wade talks to the furniture or he thinks he’s in a movie.

“Yeah, I really like dinosaurs,” the Author tells Deadpool, setting a mug of coffee down on the corner of a desk full of paper. “Not as much as horses, but they’re definitely my top five favorite creatures.”

Logan sniffs as Wade’s scent changes: His vitals are spiking—from readiness, yes, but not panic. His heart’s pumping steady, and everything else seems normal. There’s something floating around him like smoke, too.

Goddamn it, Wade smells like… like Jean Grey or Charles Xavier did, when they saw something. Or when someone saw them.

“This dumbass better not be a psychic,” Logan gripes to Laura as the weather reports come on. “We already get enough shit from him.”

“And why are dinosaurs in your top five favorites?” Deadpool asks.

“Because… I like exploring how nature is outside of our control,” the Author admits sheepishly, drinking some coffee. “I mean, I live in North California. We got the ocean next door, and there’s forests everywhere.”

“Ma’am, you said this was a road trip, not a Dark Souls boss fight,” Deadpool points out. “I have yet to see one car in this fanfic that didn’t zoom away from the eldritch being like a NASCAR hopeful, or get crushed under its terrible claws! Setting the story up is one thing, but do you have ADHD, perchance?”

“Well, I show symptoms of ADHD, but not enough to get the fucking meds,” the Author huffs. “They recommended mindfulness meditation to set a routine. You know, the thing I already told them I’m not good at.”

“The failures of American healthcare, people! So why is the lizard asking about his family?”

“Because it’s foreshadowing, sir,”she retorts. “He’s not right about Johnny, but he’ll find his real family eventually.” She checks her notes. “They’ll get to your place soon, and the storm will stop in a couple more days. I’m not THAT mean.”

—

In the living room, Logan and Laura are watching the news, and it is bad. Streets on the TV are covered in ankle-deep water, and the winds have been battering furniture, potted plants, and tree branches against the walls.

“This looks like a cyclone, but we are on the entirely wrong coast for that,” a baffled reporter says. “Long Island has canceled school attendance until further notice. Parents in other neighborhoods, it’s rough driving in this weather. When in doubt, stay home except for groceries and necessary trips. If anything changes, we will send an official flood warning for the entire city.”

Laura checks out the window: There’s no floods yet, but the street’s gutters are really full.

—

“Wait a minute!” Deadpool realizes. “Gambit is a dancer, and Blade can spot dancers and actors a mile away. And the whole story started with a Filipino monster! Are YOU a Filipino dancer or actor appearing in this fanfic? You sly creature! You made a self-insert character, didn’t you?!”

“I have such conflicting feelings about Gambit,” the Author says. “Like, I watched this guy in X-Men Evolution, and I had fun seeing things explode, but twenty years later, he’s Channing Tatum and he’s HOT. Sure, I’m thirsty for Live-Action Gambit, but how is Rogue going to get her man?! So I made another chick with gloves, trauma, and shitty powers! We’ll see if the studios decide to bring Comic-Accurate Rogue to the films. I looked for canon Filipino characters, but apart from Blade fighting the aswang, I could only find Anitun Tabu, and she’s not Tagalog.”

“There’s no self-insert like a nerdy actor using fanfic in place of therapy,” Deadpool says. “American healthcare strikes again!”

“Oh, I’m not an actor. I just really, really wanted to be, but it never quite worked out,” Suddenly she’s needling him, voice tight and eyes narrow. “Why do you think I’m writing FANFIC?”

“Lovely… Callbacks to things I said?” He twists his hands. “That hurts. But… wait, Gambit said he was born in the Void! Why is he meeting the most plot-protected Resistance members and talking about his comic-accurate shitty life?”

“No, he thought he was born in the Void. Because the Void is where worlds are sent to die, and I’m guessing that fucks with your head,” the Author says. “This is more foreshadowing.”

“Oh boyyyyy, that sounds autistic.”

“Sure, but I’m still trying to convince people my memory is shitty enough to get ADHD meds.” the Author finally drinks from the mug of coffee and makes a face. “Oh, it’s cold. Anyway, Deadpool, you’re an obnoxious motherfucker, but you did more for Gambit in one satire than Marvel did in ten years. My boy Channing talks about Gambit as if he almost died, but you finally put him on screen. And it gives me hope that I can finally get somewhere, BEFORE I die or I get too old.”

“That… that hurts in a different way,” Deadpool says. “I give you HOPE?”

“Where else am I gonna get it, Wade?!” Her voice gets hoarse and lower, and she grabs his shoulders. “Wade! WADE! GET UP!”

Deadpool jerks away from the fourth wall to hear thunder, the TV’s murmuring across the room, and his own ears ringing.

“WADE!” Logan is shaking him. “It’s fucking bad out there! Call Vanessa and—”

“Two days,” Wade rasps.

“What?”

“The Author’s just talking about how nature is out of our control! All we need is to hide like frightened children for two more days!”

Nearby, Laura has one arm linked with Blind Al’s, and the other holds Mary Puppins.

She and her dad take a look at each other.

“You doing coke again, or are you about to get into some superhero shit?” Blind Al wonders.

“Damn it.” And Logan sighs. “You weren’t even watching the news.”

Since they can’t leave a dog and a blind woman alone in this weather, they trade off one adult for each outside task.

—

Logan and Laura do a grocery run, wading through deepening water and panic-buyers, trying to gather three days’ worth of non-perishable food into the cart.

Logan can’t help grabbing an armful of things from a lone white man’s stuffed cart. He moves them to a nearby dark-skinned man’s cart, who has a kid and a teenager trailing behind him.

“HEY!” The first man puffs up indignantly. “You took my stuff!”

“It ain’t your stuff without a receipt,” Logan snaps. “The news said to get three days of extra food, not three months! You a bottomless pit or what?”

“You still can’t—”

“You want to take it back from that guy and his kids?” Logan straightens up and glares—down—at him. “Go ahead, bub.”

He hunches and scurries off to the cashier.

Thank you! The little boy waves, but his voice doesn’t come from his mouth.

There is that startling push of someone getting into Logan’s head, but even without knowing who it’s from, it’s short and clumsy.

Danny, get out of there! The teenager flinches and gestures to his dad, who picks up the younger boy. This is smooth and practiced: It must have happened before.

“Jessie, take the cart. I need to tell Danny something.”

Is your name Logan? My friend is Logan, and he’s really short and he likes Star Wars! And so the kid’s mouth—well, head—is running a mile a minute now, even as his dad is hauling him away.

The kid’s voice gets a lot quieter after thirty or forty feet.

Motor-mouth aside, there’s none of the pain or intrusion Logan’s felt when adult psychics fuck with him. This is just a kid half his size, blundering around.

Logan wonders how long he’s had his powers.

The dark man smells normal, but the teen and his brother smell like they’ve got that mutant gene.

They only go a few aisles away—hidden enough for regular people, especially with the crowds, but Logan can still hear them.

“Buddy, don’t do that with strangers,” the father whispers. “You don’t know if they’ll get mad at you.”

“But he was nice and he gave us stuff!”

“No, Danny, sometimes people start nice and then—”

Logan walks over now, and he’s not sure if he should be sad or relieved that they think he’s NICE.

“Don’t worry about it,” Logan tells them, and the man flinches as he spots the long shadow darkening the aisle.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. Whatever he saw, he’s just a kid. We’re trying to teach him boundaries and all, but only one person can actually—”

“I didn’t track you guys,” Logan tells him. “Not the way you think.”

How does he show them he’s a different mutant without using the claws, or talking about scents? He scans the aisle: It’s almost picked clean, with just a few items left and loose screws scattered on the floor. The uncaring crowds are surging past; nobody’s bothering to pick up the scraps just yet.

Logan picks a screw up, drawing the point over the back of his arm with a grimace. Blood wells up, and he raises his arm so they can see the wound close. 

“Dad! He’s like me and Jessie!” The kid tugs at his father’s sleeve.

“I didn’t know that before,” Logan says, and he quiets down the irritating voice in his head because it’s not a LIE. “What I did know is that guy was being a—a jerk. No fu—freaking… shame. Stuffing his cart like that.”

Presently, their teenagers come along with the carts.

“Dad, people are starting to watch us,” Laura warns him.

“Yeah, we’re almost done.” Logan takes the cart again; super-strength aside, Laura is way too short to fend off crowds of panicking grocery shoppers. They’ll be going after the food, not her.

“Thanks for helping, Logan,” the teenager calls to him out loud.

They pick what crowded lines have room. Soon, even Logan can’t see or smell the family anymore.

In the car, Laura makes sure the windows are closed. “Psychics?”

“Mm-hmm,” he confirms. “Kid needs to learn the rules before getting in people’s heads like that.”

Now, psychics talk about rules and ethics with mind-powers, and the things they should or shouldn’t do when they get into people’s heads. But they act more like their powers are limbs, or muscles that they work out. A lot of them go through the motions to move a boulder or push an enemy, and others use funky little gestures instead. About half of them don’t know they’re doing it, and they get surprised or embarrassed when someone mimics them.

If a psychic is beat by another psychic, or if they’re cut off from their powers, sometimes they beg and thrash like an animal in a trap, and their scents are full of pain, the same as if their bodies are caught.

Charles had laughed at him (nicely) once, when Logan asked if he had the strongest telepathy in the world because he couldn’t walk.

“Logan, I had my powers for quite a while before that,” Charles said. “As a young man, I got in a fight with an alien called Lucifer, and he ended the fight after he dropped a boulder on me.”

“Hmph. Shit sounds rough,” he’d admitted. “Is that why you preach non-violence now?”

Another kind (nostalgic?) laugh. “It was an adjustment to start using a wheelchair, but my views on mutants weren’t informed by becoming disabled.”

Driving off through soggy streets, Logan doesn’t know if he’ll see Danny, Jessie or their father again.

Charles, he thinks as he turns the wipers on. We got kids who might need you. He doesn’t know if it’s a prayer, or if he hopes some version of Charles Xavier will answer him.

— In another part of the city, on the streets drained of people, the Resistance has recovered enough for everyone to run on their own power.

Now the only stumbling they do is across an empty lot.

Or, basically empty.

A rusty fence is rimmed with old caution tape around a house gutted from fire. Half the roof is gone and the timbers exposed like bare bones. But there’s a shed in the yard with its roof intact, and the door looks solid enough.

“Let’s go!” Gambit calls hoarsely, and he waits at a corner of the fence for Johnny. “Tick-Tock hates you the most, angel! You can’t light up without letting him know where we are!”

“Yeah, point!” Johnny takes a look at the dragon-turned-storm sweeping over the city before he gets a boost over, but as he runs for the shed’s door, he only rattles a padlock. “Oh shit, it’s locked!”

Gambit waves for Blade or Elektra while Johnny swears and starts heaving at the door.

“Johnny, don’t you think about burning nothing!” Blade warns.

As thunder booms and Gambit launches him up, Blade can’t help looking back at the sky while it cracks open again with blue light. When he lands and struggles to roll—it has been a long fucking day—he grips the quaking buntot-pagi in its driftwood handle.

Gambit takes hold of Elektra’s shoulder and hoists her over the fence. It’s stiffer and slower than usual, but he can do it.

Then he backs away and his scent changes, with his explosion-energy roiling in him as he runs at the fence. He uses his bo-staff to launch himself over, but even with that, it’s too high and too long of a jump to be quite normal—Blade thinks Gambit’s floating for a moment, at the peak of his arc.

But as terrible and beautiful as he moves when he uses his powers, Gambit still looks like a human. The same way he still grieves like a human, faces death like a human, and he deals with shitty other people like a human.

And then gravity catches up and he hits the ground too hard, so he has to crank himself up with his staff. “Oh, bon amis,” he pants as he runs over. “I’m running out of juice.”

“We’ll get a break if we could just OPEN THIS MOTHERFUCKING DOOR!” Johnny heaves again at the stubborn lock.

As Johnny and Elektra team up to pry the lock open with one of Elektra’s sais, it comes away instead, dusting their hands with dead wood.

“Shit,” Johnny’s mouth tightens. “Uh… good news! It’s not locked anymore! Is the buwaya gonna find us, though?!”

“It’s either no roof or no lock!” Elektra retorts. “Everyone in!”

Blade holds the door open for the others. As the wind starts threatening to blow the door open, he glares at it and rips his buntot-pagi out of the half-dead handle, then shoves it in the spot where the failed lock was.

It glows purple, and the wind stops whistling through the gaps.

“Oh.” Blade looks at the others. “We got a lock.”

It’s not a PERFECT solution: They can’t feel the winds, but they can hear them—and the buwaya, too, as it crashes back down among distant screams.

“Human! Soulllllllllls!”

Three of them flinch: It’s far, sure, but it’s louder than anything they heard in the warehouse.

Johnny doubles over again from whatever is making him and that lizard too familiar, and Gambit puts his arm over Johnny’s ears.

“Just wait a bit, angel,” Gambit whispers. “Tick-Tock’s not a homebody! We gotta ride the storm out, and then we’ll—”

The stingray’s barb is boiling hot near Blade’s cautious wrist, and it’s dripping purple again.

“Does it sense spirits coming?” Elektra wonders.

“It don’t do nothing with spirits,” Blade says. “Not that Gomez knows, anyway. He just said it poisons them. Maybe the buwaya’s got more juice to get it angry?”

The Pinoy spirits might take Blade for an aswang, but that same error means they don’t always tell him the finer details of nature and gods and Pinoy magic. After all, they think he already knows.

Even if they realize he’s fighting them half-blind, they figure he’s mixed or he’s American-born, but sometimes Blade needs to tell them that he’s not Filipino at all. It doesn’t help that he barely looks out of place among all those dark-skinned spirits and their dark curly hair.

“You’re not always seeing them, exactly,” the swordsmith Gomez explains as he sharpens the sword. “Not all Pinoys are super dark with afros, but people might see the spirits like that. Sometimes they’re pale instead—it depends.”

“So they’re shapeshifters?”

“It’s more like they have glamours. Or you have expectations.” Gomez checks the edge and starts working on the other side. “Look, we had colorism before Spain: Dark-skinned people lookedpoor because they had to work outside. But Spain, they brought a caste system. They said the pagan natives were short and dark and foreign, and the good natives who played nice were tall and pale, or just brown enough to be exotic. Sometimes you’ll see spirits with tattoos now, even if their people didn’t used to have them. You see what you think monsters should look like. And Spain, they called people with dark skin ‘monsters.’”

Remembering that, Blade realizes all the times that Filipino spirits called Blade an aswang. Was it just because that’s their word for ‘vampire,’ or did they think he was an actual aswang, because he’s dark?

Does he still think monsters look like himself?

It makes him feel strange that Filipino monsters think he’s a Filipino monster, like when the deceased on the Day of the Dead think he’s one of them, a dead person who’s just visiting relatives.

“What does holding the sun mean?” Elektra wonders, jolting him out of his thoughts.

“When Filipino spirits say that, it means we’re up in the daytime. A lot of times, it also means ‘humans’ in general.”

“Well, Johnny is human. But why is it asking about its kinsman?”

“The buwaya doesn’t speak human languages,” Eric tells her. “Godzilla ain’t bright—he could mean a lot of things.”

“Fuck, he’s eating now,” Johnny rasps into Gambit’s elbow, and they know he’s not just remembering what happened in Los Angeles.

In the magical realm, something like a rope coils tight around their Human Torch, and Blade and Elektra both know that the other can feel it.

“Johnny?” Elektra asks. “Did you feel or see anything before you got eaten?”

“Sure, let’s start from square one,” Johnny untangles from Gambit, but he’s not happy: “First things first: I got flayed. Motherfucking shit, I hate Cassandra Nova! So there’s the worst five seconds of my life. Painpainpainpainpain. I think she made sure to take me apart after my skin got lost, but my soul or my thinking-parts needed to… catch up? My body is a pool of innards in the dirt, but Thinking-Me just feels everything on fire in the bad way, so when I’m not mentally screaming, I’m going, ‘Anyone who’s listening! I need you to do me a solid! You gotta heal me or kill me again, asap! Smaug! Zeus! Baba Yaga! Please! Put me the fuck out of my misery!’”

“Ohhhh.” That’s from both Blade and Elektra, but she’s the one who follows up. “Looks like Tick-Tock heard your prayers.”

“Is he a god?!”

“No, gods get worshiped,” Blade says. “But Filipino crocodiles, they’re high up in the spirit-world. They got stuff to do with life and death.”

The rattling of the buntot-pagi quiets down. Blade holds it in place, but it doesn’t feel loose, and the wind and rain are starting to let up.

“Boy, why were you praying to Baba Yaga?” Blade wonders. “I don’t know what she is, but I know she ain’t a god. Or the kind of person you want help from.”

“Hey! I said heal me or kill me!” Johnny retorts. “Maybe she wanted some Human Torch barbecue! I was messed the fuck up, remember? Smaug isn’t even real!”

“He ain’t real in our worlds, Johnny,” Gambit cautioned. “Laura’s daddy and Mr. Sunshine didn’t know me. And they were sure as hell taller than my Wolverine.”

Shit, there was that reminder about how many different worlds were floating out in the universe. They already had one dragon trying his damnedest to kill a city, and they didn’t need a second one.

Blade looks out of the crack by the door: The storm is all he can hear for now, with no sign of the buwaya’s rampage. “Just don’t ring her up again too soon.”

—

Wade, in a classic comedy cut to a semi-related scene, is waiting for the Wolverine family to get back home. He sends a text to everyone he knows is in driving distance of New York City: Hey guys, it’s Wade. Big storm in New York City. Everyone okay?

The next thirty minutes or so has a flurry of texts about every five minutes, and after checking his What’s App with tight lips, he must have accidentally texted EVERYONE. Scanning the responses, he spots two of them:

Vanessa’s text is short and sweet: Don’t worry, Wade. I’m keeping an eye on the water. <3

Mate, I’m in California, but thanks for checking, someone’s text says.

Whose number changed??? Why are you in California??? Wade texts back.

It’s Russell, mate. You got shot ten years ago, remember?

This dumbass got shot SO MANY TIMES, Domino texts. You need something more specific.

We were locked up and THEN you got shot.

I’m so sorry, baby girl, that’s not enough! Wade texts back. Are there non-confidential details that you can talk about?

Not right now, mate, the mystery man answers. Stay dry out there.

Hang on! If you’re calling me mate… are you British or Australian???

Close! New Zealand!

Fuck yeah, we have ONE detail!

I’ll find more illegal shit to jog your memory later. In a California cafe, a young Maori man with brown skin, long black curls, and a black beard chuckles.

—

“Is that more foreshadowing?!” Deadpool bolts up and starts hunting for the Fourth Wall. “HEY! BABY GIRL! WHO DO I KNOW THAT LOOKS LIKE KHAL DROGO?!”

“Oh, you weren’t pretending that you didn’t remember him?” And the Author laughs. “Bro, he told you his name and what you guys did!”

“Yeah, but RUSSELL?! The least heroic of superhero legal names?! He said it’s been ten fucking years!” Deadpool retorts.

—

In the dim shed, cold and cramped as it is, at least the Resistance can finally rest. Gambit and Johnny probably couldn’t move much farther than each other even if they wanted to, and Blade tries to squeeze past Elektra and a stack of sagging boxes.

His coat catches, and he yanks at it once or twice before too many things start moving and clanking for his comfort, so he sheds it instead.

“Bitch-ass coat,” he gripes as he sits somewhere in front of her instead, leather shifting past leather. “You ain’t got stuck on nothing for twenty damn years.”

“Oh, it’s the same coat?” Elektra must be grinning near his temple. Sure, he can’t see her face, but he can hear her, and he knows what her eyes look like when she’s about to tease someone (him). “And here I thought you finally had your first mid-life crisis, Eric.”

“Wait,” Gambit asks above Johnny’s shoulder. “How come the Filipinos in the Thieves’ Guild didn’t say nothing about Tick-Tock? I heard about the stingray tail, but Pinoys from the islands call their cops crocodiles. ‘Cause they hungry for a fight, or for money. I ain’t heard from them if anyone came back after getting smoked like Johnny!”

“Jesus Christ, sweetness!” Johnny puts his head in his heads. “At least my mind’s off the lizard! How do you know that shit?!”

And now everyone remembers that Gambit used to be a criminal.

But, well… he doesn’t talk about it a lot.

Blade thinks that this is yet another sign that their Remy LeBeau isn’t old, but he’s not young, either.

Young men who lived on the streets? A lot of them are still hurting, or still trying to hurt people. Gambit isn’t hurting, not in the raw and stinging way that young men are. No, he is steadfast (experienced?), charming (kind?), and once Laura came around—the only person he’d met in the Void connected to that missing Wolverine he’d been talking about—he’d tell her endless stories about Charles Xavier and the X-Men, and all the stuff they got up to (family).

“Were they Catholic?” Blade asks. “They might not have known themselves. This kind of stuff is… told as needed.”

Hell, he doesn’t even know if Remy is Catholic. As much as he talks about God and angels and the teachings of Jesus, their Remy LeBeau doesn’t act Catholic.

—

When Johnny passed out on Remy’s shoulder, Elektra and Laura had shuffled away to get him and themselves into actual beds.

Remy, though, he just took his gloves and coat off, and he held vigil for Frank with a chipped wine-glass full of deep and dark red Mavroudi wine. To Blade, the offering on the table smelled like the sunny waters of Greece, and of a man who took twenty years to get home.

“Frank don’t drink wine,” Blade had said to him. “Not enough to know that fancy Greek stuff.”

“Ain’t always the point to give him stuff he’d pick, Monsieur Haint.” The Cajun shook his head. “Am I gonna ask him to crack open some cans of beer, like we watching a game? I don’t need psychic powers to know our drinks didn’t smell nice to the spirits.”

“They smelled like grief,” Blade admitted.

“I don’t know if you knew street kids, Frank.” Remy poured himself some wine, into a regular glass with a spiderweb of cracks, and it smelled normal: Fruity, sweet, and dark. “I didn’t set foot in a real church till I was thirteen—after Jean-Luc officially adopted me, instead of just fostering me. The shelter chapels, they soured me when I was little. I knew what to do, but I only went to Mass if they wouldn’t let me in. Stand here, kneel there, listen to folks talk however long they want; and now you pray, or keep quiet while other folks pray. Once the paperwork went through with Jean-Luc, I started going every week, and church is more tolerable when you ain’t hungry. Folks don’t say I’m a bad Catholic, but I’d rather save the time from going to church and be nice to people instead, after seeing how that church crowd does things. They get off the pews and they boss some waitress around like she’s their maid, or they act a fool and scream at the bartender like they didn’t just hear the pastor talk for an hour.”

Remy’s hands were shaking now—was it from grief, or his memories, or just all the booze he drank?—and a bit of wine sloshed out, coating his fingers like blood. “Frank, y’all ate like you was deader than Eric over there. Just scooping up whatever was in front of you, no making faces about things you don’t like. I hope you let yourself taste something again, now that you’re finally across. If you don’t like it, have your pretty wife try some.”

A trick of the light as he held the glass up made his bloodshot eyes turn red—but the scent of the wine changed from wine to the sunny ocean, and the deepening scent of magic put Blade on edge.

“Remy, what you doing?” Blade didn’t know what this shit was, but he knew it wasn’t Catholic. The Cajun’s spirit was open like a door now, blowing the smells of salt and sun all over the room.

“Look, neither of the Matts much liked alcohol, and I get that,” he said. “But Frank? He’s our boy.”

“You got some on the table! You don’t gotta eat on a grown man’s behalf!”

“Oh! Monsieur Haint is worried about more haints, is he?” Remy laughed, his eyes bright and his voice dark from the alcohol. “Street folks, we have our own customs, and there’s a lot of us that figured how the spirits need help eating sometimes.”

A more formal offering like the cider Remy had left for the first Matt Murdock, that was normal. Leaving portions for the spirits to join the meal, that kind of stuff was all over the planet as far as Blade had seen. Even Catholics (for they were always the odd ones of the Christian religious family) might let themselves leave their dead loved ones a plate or a drink that they once loved.

Eating something yourself, though, and telling the spirits to taste it through you? Most witches or mages—the ones that hadn’t been homeless, at least—they said that was possession, or too close to it for their liking. They’d say a spirit might not want to leave, or you might attract the wrong kind.

But what do street kids care about the spirit world’s dangers? Blade realized bitterly. The real world is bad enough for them.

Yet their own Frank Castle appeared, worn and tired but finally relaxed. With bloody mouth and bloody gear, his transparent hand picked up a shadow of the wine glass on the table.

“Goddamn, Remy,” Blade said. “The fuck kind of magic are street kids working down South?”

Remy laughed again. “When I start eating with the spirits, folks say all sorts of stories. My wife near had a heart attack when she saw me leaving out food the first time. Maybe the kids I knew lucked out, or maybe the spirits just didn’t feel like messing with us.”

“You told me you ain’t met a haint before,” Blade remembered. “But you good with calling up the spirits to ride you for a drink?”

“Telling someone to eat ain’t like being ridden, Eric,” Remy assured him, but Blade wouldn’t know what the fuck kind of difference there’d be. “I didn’t learn enough to do anything like Voodoo in the streets, even if I had the bloodlines.”

“Then how’d you just call up Frank Castle?!” Blade demanded, pointing to their friend’s ghost out of habit. “You can’t even see him!” He forced himself to put his arm down.

“Frank’s our boy, and he ain’t too far yet,” Remy mused, shifting back in his chair. “Look, enough folks in New Orleans know about the street-gods if they need to—at least enough to keep from making them mad. If we were doing something we shouldn’t, I’d say someone would have told me in ten years.”

“You think people care about orphans messing with street-gods, Remy?!” And Blade doesn’t know why he’s so upset, but he tries to keep his voice down. “You tried to steal from some guy, and he decided to be your new daddy! What if he wasn’t in the Thieves’ Guild, or you weren’t young enough for him to think you were cute? Once you got too big, he could have shot you or called the cops to do it!”

“And you got caught by a vampire hunter!” Remy grinned. “You were awful lucky that Whistler didn’t finish the job, Eric.”

Well, Blade couldn’t stay mad (worried) at Remy for that. Because before Whistler came along, all Eric Brooks had cared about was how long he’d gone without blood—and if he was caught in the middle of a meal, how fast he could run.

Frank still wasn’t drinking, eyeing the shadow-glass warily. Soon he put it back down, and then Blade had to laugh, the tightness in his chest easing up.

“Is Frank finally cracking jokes, Haint?” Gambit wondered. “Of course he wouldn’t do it when I can hear him.”

“I told you Frank don’t drink wine.” Blade shook his head. “He think he gonna break that thing.”

“Wine ain’t rocket science, Frank!” Remy said in the direction of the other glass, laughing slow and easy. “Just take your time with it. You already dead—it can’t hurt you.” He swirled his almost-broken glass before he drank again, but then he held it out towards Blade. “You want the rest, Eric? I been drinking enough.”

Well, now two people were drinking, even if one of them was dead and hesitant. With the rumble of no blood in Blade’s stomach, and with Gambit’s soul so open and hurting and melancholy, Blade was drawn to him and the offering-wine before he quite realized he was walking.

Frank’s wine tasted different from the calmer (distant) offerings Gambit had left for Matt Murdock and Matt-called-Daredevil. The smells of the sea and the sun faded fast into the spirit world, and in the sweet-sting of red wine, Blade saw flashes of the stories Gambit told about Remy, the kid with no parents and no last name.

Gambit hadn’t been lying about how small he’d been as a kid—because how do you grow without food?

Sometimes he stole from regular folks, and sometimes they stole from him. Remy didn’t seem unhappy, more resigned to the blistering Southern heat in the day, and the moist cold at night.

The street kids told each other stories about the shapes in the lake or in the bayou water, and spirits hiding in the concrete. A Black man called Mr. Osprey appeared if someone was hurt or wounded; sometimes he’d heal people or turn into his namesake on the search to heal them, but sometimes he’d lie down with the dying and let them pass, warm arms tight around stiffening flesh.

There was shockingly little fear or dread for the street kids. But why would they fear Osprey? He wasn’t violent or scary, just there. When one of Remy’s friends vanished in the water, when one got heat-stroke in the summer, and one got too cold when it rained, Osprey comforted the living as much as the dead, wiping tears on his shirt or letting people hug one of his lean black dogs with golden collars.

Now the teens and adults, they had a lot more fear of death, if not Osprey. They feared drugged food from false kindness, they feared getting hit by uncaring cars, and they feared either men or angels-that-looked-like-men. Some older folks called Osprey “The Man Who Comes To Judge.”

Blade didn’t know who Osprey was judging, but one time Remy and a handful of his friends were flat-out begging to be let into a shelter. Osprey’s black dogs were snarling out at the darkness around them, ringing around the kids’ small forms as their small hands pounded at the door.

Blade was glad that this memory ended when the door finally opened, even if baffled adults couldn’t hear the dogs and didn’t know why all these kids were so frantic and crying.

He didn’t want to see what violent men or violent angels that Osprey’s dogs were keeping at bay, but soon his glass was empty and his stomach demanded more, because he’d gone so long without blood or his serum to replace it.

No one had told Eric Brooks any stories, or shown him street-prayers in Los Angeles. No, Eric Brooks was what people told stories about. But something hurt him deep about how Remy-Before-LeBeau was just… blown around in all this shit, without even the excuse of being a mutant first.

“Why you calling Johnny an angel?” Blade wondered to his grown version of Remy, wiping his tired (hurting) eyes. “Wasn’t that the thing chasing you when you were a kid?”

“There’s angels all over the place, Eric. Osprey used to be one. They can help you or be mad at you, it’s a case-by-case thing.” Remy LeBeau, the man long out of the street life? He laughed, and he poured Blade more wine.

“These ain’t no angels.” Blade swigged from his glass of salt-and-sun. No, Gambit’s angels sounded like fairies—the kind from the old tales, the things that looked human but acted like monsters. “I don’t know what the street-folks be praying to in New Orleans, but they ain’t no goddamn angels.”

“Don’t nobody read the Bible in the Void?” Gambit chuckled. “Some of those got a lot more wings than Mr. Osprey does, Eric.”

“Why you so nice, boy?!” Blade exploded, his shoulders shaking and his chest hurting. “Why people made you sit through Mass before they let you eat, and you prayed to them wild bayou angels who’d kill you as soon as help you, and—and you ain’t fucking mad about it?!”

So he drained his glass again, but he spilled some on his shirt this time, and he cried without knowing why—or not for which reason. Because Frank Castle was dead and because Remy couldn’t eat before he at least pretended to be Catholic, because that roaring ache about both of them just won’t let up.

“Ooh, Frank’s wine be stronger on you than Matt’s stuff.” Remy pulled him into the chair. “We know him too well, I reckon.”

“At least people had a reason to treat me like shit! Because I drank their blood, so I scared them!” He tried to wipe his face, but he’d forgot about the wine on it, that damn ocean smell smearing red across one cheek. “You only got your powers after you left the streets! You weren’t no fucking monster, Remy! You were ten years old!”

“You and Frank gotta stop calling yourselves those names.” Remy wet a rag from the sink and wiped him off; the rag was cold and soothing, but his hand against Blade’s skin was hot. “Ain’t no reason I didn’t know my first daddy. Ain’t no reason people made a kid listen to folks telling tales about God for a cold sandwich. Might as well be mad that the lake is too big, or the summer’s too hot.”

Was this what being drunk was like? Blade thought people were happy about it. He got up on wobbling legs, struggling to remember which way his room was, but Remy caught up soon and he sat him back in the chair, chuckling.

“If you still hungry, I’ll give you another glass, Eric,” he said, pouring out two more drinks. “But I gotta cut you off soon if Frank’s wine don’t agree with you.”

So the ghost of Frank Castle nursed his own glass with Eric and Remy, until the sun came up.

Blade half-expected him to vanish at dawn, like the vampires he’d often hunted, but Frank stayed with them a long while after.

He clapped a hand on Johnny’s arm as he woke up complaining about a headache, and he read comics silently over Laura’s shoulder.

Sometimes Blade or Elektra would feel cold hands guiding them to hidden parts of Frank’s seemingly-endless arsenal.

Sometimes they’d see a tense shadow in one doorway or another, but that white skull on his chest was always there to let them know it was Frank Castle, warning his friends about trouble.

And Blade himself? He kept the Punisher’s empty gun, strapped in with his other weapons, oiled and technically working.

But he couldn’t make himself reload it, not even after cold hands showed him a loose floorboard that revealed yet more boxes of bullets.

“I know you got bullets damn near everywhere,Frank,” he said to the shadow of his friend. “It just… don’t feel right.”

—

Deadpool tightens his lips. “Is… is all the ghost-story business gonna be important?”

“Yes, Frank is important.” The Author assures him. “And you and Wolverine can’t die, which will also be important, but that’s more world-building than plot stuff.”

“Why is Gambit so pagan woo-woo when he’s supposed to be Catholic?”

“Deadpool, I JUST wrote an author’s note about homeless kids’ spirituality,” The Author reminds him, her face in her hand. “How can you get into that trendy Catholicism, without any parents to keep a house for you to park a car at, before you go to Sunday Mass and give up a chunk of your nonexistent income for donations? I don’t even know if Gambit got baptized, because it’s not like HE’D know! So now my boy Remy is just raw-dogging the spirit world.”

“I can see why you like Channing Tatum’s Gambit if you’re the worst at sexual metaphors,” he laments. “Wait! Why is Blade keeping the Punisher’s gun as a tragic keepsake?! Will he finally reload it for a jizz-inducing fight scene?! Ohhhhhhhh, what if he’s gonna pistol-whip someone? You gotta give me time to prep for that, baby girl!”

Chapter 3

As the hours drag on in the shed, the Resistance goes from resting to chafing. The wind dies down and the rain slows its pummeling of the concrete, and they’re just stuck in whatever shreds of light make it through the cloudy skies and boarded-up windows.

But it took them long enough to get in here, and that’s the only thing they can really do about the buwaya. Run and hide. The buwaya doesn’t just eat people, either, it eats “what can fit in its mouth.”

Where is that woman who told Blade what the buwaya was? Is she hiding like they are? He hopes she hasn’t gotten eaten—but he wouldn’t know how to call her on purpose.

Thank you for your concern, aswang, the Filipino woman tells him. I’ve been looking for you, but the buwaya are… DIFFICULT creatures.

Good to see you, Tita. There’s one problem down, so Blade shifts—against Elektra’s shoulder, it turns out, and then he freezes and pops away. “Sorry.”

“Eric, we have a lot more problems to deal with than personal space.” Again he can hear her smile. “But thank you.”

So Johnny—our friend—he was dead for a while, he tells the woman. The buwaya brought him back to life after eating his soul. If he lights up his fire, the buwaya comes over and starts asking us about his ‘kinsman.’ Is Johnny gonna die if we fight him?

Blade hates the thought of picking between Johnny Storm and a REAL fucking storm, but he needs to get that out of the way. (He is afraid that he will pick Johnny. Especially after he died already.)

Fear not for your friend, she assures him. Well, apart from the OBVIOUS reasons. But these buwaya are storms; they need not birth young, nor raise them. He must have been a man once—before Spain came, people would sacrifice one of their own to the buwaya for protection. If they are offered a human soul, so they should gain a human mind and heart, and become a true dragon. But, well… there are buwaya and there are buwaya.

They the same word, Tita, he points out.

That IS the problem, aswang, she tells him with a sigh. They didn’t always know which buwaya would answer—the creature, or the storm.

And they still got themselves killed? He wonders what kind of shit would be so bad it would make a man risk eating people and spirits like steak. Pinoys hate crocodiles now! The buwaya ain’t dragons or gods or nothing to them—they just dirty cops who kill you or take bribes! Ain’t nobody gonna tell us if they’re related to one!

CATHOLICS hate crocodiles now, the woman spits, and Blade winces in spite of himself—that name sounds like dirt in her mouth, but he can’t blame her for it.

Well, how do we find Tick-Tock’s kin, Tita? Gonna take a while to sort out those DNA tests.

Even if he cannot speak WELL, he can do it, she says. If you find someone who speaks to animals or at least a Tagalog, they’ll understand him better than I can.

Wait… you don’t understand him, Tita? Oh, this is a bad sign.

The buwaya are not gods themselves,she tells him. Gods get worshiped, and the buwaya care not whether mortals fear or love them. But Filipino magic is still stronger through blood ties. If you cannot find someone who speaks to the creatures of the wilds, then you MUST find a Tagalog.

Fuck. He hadn’t been in the Philippines too long, but he remembered what felt like myriad languages in the islands, and the lines of hatred between Tagalogs and Ilokanos and all those other peoples.

“What’s wrong?” Elektra’s voice grazes his ear, and when her hand presses on his shoulder, he realizes how tense he is.

“We gonna need a translator for Godzilla,” Blade tells her, with his opposite shoulder crunching against a soggy cardboard box. “I ain’t good enough at Tagalog to talk to him, Johnny don’t like hearing him, and the only Pinoy spirit I know just said she ain’t Tagalog.”

“Hoo.” There’s Gambit twisting open a flask, and Blade can make out the flick of his wet brown hair as he shakes his head. “I hope your buddy ain’t Visayan. Tick-Tock gonna be zooming after Visayans faster than he does with Johnny.” Silver glints as he holds it up, and Blade can smell sweet-and-sour palm wine. “You want some, Tita? It’s too warm, but it’s all I have right now.”

“Remy,” Blade sighs. “There’s a goddamn dragon next door. You can’t let spirits be riding you when Godzilla’s trying to eat everything that got two legs.”

Gambit’s spirit isn’t wide open, like it was for Frank Castle. But he might be remembering something about the mortal Filipinos he’s known, for a hot blast of sea-wind blows into the spirit-world, filled with the reek of dead bodies.

I suppose I’ll have some, the woman says with a sigh, and her shadow takes the shadow of Gambit’s flask. The buwaya’s almost full by now, aswang. If you go outside, he will not seek you out.

Blade frees his coat from wherever it got stuck, then figures out how to stretch without bumping too many things or people. How many souls does a buwaya need, Tita? He a big-ass motherfucker.

To eat? Not as many as you’d think, she says. Perhaps a dozen souls would keep him full for at least a few weeks. But the buwaya are not… MEASURED, as you’ve seen.

No, how measured is a creature that calls up storms? Blade hasn’t forgotten the sight of souls dripping purple from its jaws, or how its stray thunder slammed him into a car, or how Johnny and Remy were all but laid out from that same blast.

“Remy, how many Filipinos are in the Thieves’ Guild?” Elektra wonders.

“They ain’t just in the Guild, sha,” he says. “There’s a lot of Pinoys in New Orleans. The oldest families, their daddies were sailors on the Manila Galleons, and ain’t none of them gone back on the ships.” He shakes the flask, though he’s the only living person who drank from it. “Guess Tita’s done by now. Whoever wants some, go ahead.”

“You are always fucking drinking, Sweetness.” But Johnny takes it anyway. “Thanks, though.”

So the flask is passed around, because as much as they’d prefer food after a day of getting pulverized by a storm made flesh, alcohol is the next best thing.

Blade is the last to taste that milky white drink, for the smell of rancid-dead-bodies is mixing with the sweet warning of death-as-a-concept, and he drinks as little as he can manage.

“And that’s why I don’t give a fuck if white people think I’m Mexican,” a teenage girl with dark hair and dark skin told the younger Remy. “That’s what kept my Tatay Juan from getting caught.”

“Were folks blind back then?” Remy asked. “Filipinos don’t look like no Mexicans!”

Remy’s eyes were almost above the other boys’ heads, so he’d be close to his adult height, but his voice was still crackly. He had muscles and the ease of movement like Eric’s Remy, but he was so wiry and hard-edged that Eric thought his version could break this kid in half. And without the X-Men armor that Eric knew, a pretty but rail-thin boy almost seemed to vanish in the cluster of teens.

“The conquistadors ain’t blind, Remy, they just don’t care about the help,” she said. “‘Excuse me, have you seen a brown man with curly black hair?’ ‘Sir, this is New Orleans, they all over the city.’ ‘His name is Juan and he deserted our ship.’ ‘Bitch, this is New Orleans! There’s brown men with Spanish names all over the port! You ain’t finding this boy any time soon!’”

The other kids hooted at this story of freedom through tricking the rich people, but Remy didn’t laugh that long.

“Why all your folk deserting?” He asked. “Near all the Filipinos here came from sailors who didn’t want to sail no more. I thought y’all loved the water.”

“The water, sure! But the Spanish worked the galleon crews to death,” the Filipino girl said. “And the ones like Tatay Juan, they stepped on land and they couldn’t go back. There were plenty of jobs in New Orleans for dock workers. He just needed to lay low until they stopped looking for him.”

“But he ain’t got no people back home?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But half the crew jumped ship with Tatay Juan, so he wasn’t alone here.”

Through the chorus of teenage hurt and shock, Blade finally recognizes the look in the younger Remy’s eyes, and he wishes he didn’t.

It’s that wide, keen-edged grief that everyone’s seen too much on their older Gambit, when members of the Resistance kept dying. For Frank Castle, who never smiled, but who never strayed, either. For Matt Murdock and Matt-called-Daredevil, those two different versions of Elektra’s man. For Magneto with too many names, who Gambit used to fight against and ended up fighting alongside when both their worlds were locked up in the Void. For Johnny Storm, everyone’s dumbass little brother in a grown man’s body, and Gambit’s space-angel made of fire.

For Charles Xavier and Logan Howlett, a treacherous voice whispers in Blade’s mind.

Now, Remy-called-Gambit was a man grown, and he’d been fighting most of his life—it was a given that he felt grief. But Remy-before-Gambit? Blade doesn’t like seeing that tired old pain on a kid whose voice wasn’t done breaking yet.

But, well… Remy was homeless. He’d already lost friends and been comforted by a street-god of death, by the time he was ten.

“Tatay Juan wasn’t gambling on getting back home,” she said, and she pressed Remy’s shoulder. “It was either dying on the ocean soon, or dying here later. Sometimes you just gotta leave.”

Better to die free a day later than by the conquistador’s hand, the Filipino woman seethes.

Blade welcomes the interruption, though it stings him with how familiar this sentiment is. He’s seen it from Black Americans dealing with America, and the humans-turned-vampires who decided to walk into the sun for the last time.

He doesn’t want to drink more of Gambit’s memories, or think about the deaths of Laura’s Charles and Laura’s Logan. The palm wine’s taken the edge off his hunger, so he hands the flask back to Johnny.

Remy, though, he turns his head at the same time Elektra does. “You wasn’t kidding about needing a translator, Monsieur Haint. I hope Tita ain’t mad at me more than Tick-Tock is.”

“Boy, your Cajun ass got a lot of nerve saying you can’t understand someone’s accent!” Blade retorts, but now Elektra puts a hand on his shoulder.

“I hear her, too,” Elektra says. “We just can’t understand her.”

“She been talking to me since that goddamn lizard came around!” Blade reminds them, but now the dread is creeping into the back of his mind, like the wind through the door.

Turns out Tick-Tock and the spirit aren’t speaking English, but something about his vampirism must be helping him out.

And only him.

Great news, he thinks, and his elbow clacks against something wood. Great fucking news.

—

Deadpool is watching from the other side of the Fourth Wall. “Ooh! Is the girl from Gambit’s high school going to be important?”

“Deadpool, I’m eating,” the Author says through a mouthful of spaghetti. The room around her is more defined and better-lit now, even if it’s just a worn-out couch and a folding table for her laptop. “Okay, Blade is the only one who’s interacted with ANY Filipinos that I know about, and Gambit must know SOME Filipinos because he grew up in New Orleans, so this is gonna be important for my girl with shitty powers! And yeah, Gambit’s friend is in the Thieves’ Guild, since I planned that part anyway.”

“Six degrees of separation from Channing Tatum?” Deadpool wonders. “How many Filipinos are even in New Orleans?”

“A FUCKING LOT, WADE,” she says after shoving the last of the spaghetti into her mouth, and the near-empty bowl clacks down on her desk. “Guess why I wrote about Gambit’s flashback about the Manila Galleon trade route? Where half the sailors jumped ship the moment they reached New Orleans, a port city?”

“So the sailor’s descendant is in the Thieves’ Guild? Aren’t you worried about bad stereotypes?”

“I’ll have more than one Filipino in the cast, Deadpool,” she assures him, scraping the bowl. “And if you count the Pinoy storm-spirit and the Pinoy goddess, I have three already!”

“You’re not sounding NOT autistic right now, baby girl.”

“Tell that to the website who told me to MEDITATE my shitty memory into being better!” she snaps, but it’s not at him. “Anyway, I’d prefer to onboard my Pinoy characters into the Marvel corporatefamily with something a LITTLE more solid than Blade’s one-off adventure and implied details about Gambit’s hometown, but it’s like Louisiana wants me to come visit.”

“Are… are you gonna go?”

“I would LOVE to! Cajun food is great!” She says. “But I don’t have ‘take a trip to Louisiana’ money. All I got is fanfiction and the Hadestown soundtrack.”

“The Greek mythology musical? Is… is Greek mythology coming into the story?”

“IT’S BASED OFF NEW ORLEANS JAZZ AND ELEKTRA IS GREEK, MOTHERFUCKERS!” The Author crows. “Also, remember to go to Vanessa’s place when—”

“Sweet Marvel Jesus! The plot moves on this end!” Deadpool heads to the closet, while the Author squeaks and tries to stop him.

“No, Wade! THE PLOT’S NOT MOVING YET!” Her arms go through him as he pulls on his suit. “It’s still fucking FLOODED!”

Unfortunately, ten years of superhero experience has made Wade Wilson frighteningly fast at gearing up (especially since he can just heal if he dislocates something). He’s grabbed his keys, a couple of guns, and Baby Knife, and then he’s out the door and sloshing down the driveway to his car.

“WAAAAAADE!” The Author, gripping her temples, steps through the wall, and she hopes someone RESPONSIBLE hears her: “Hey! Wade is going to Vanessa’s place too early! Logan, can you hear me?! It’s not serious, but cars do not like all this water!”

None of them stir from their rooms.

“LAURA?!” She tries to kick at the wall, but her leg just goes through it.

Mary Puppins wakes up at the strange voice, trotting down the hallway and sniffing the Author’s shin.

“Of course it’s the one who weighs fifteen pounds,” the Author tells her with a groan. “But your little suit is not rated for severe weather, honey.”

She growls, and the Author winces.

“Oh, that was graphic. Honestly, I don’t know what I expected from someone who lives with Deadpool, but… he’s so NICE to you.”

Mary sits down, and her sideways tongue slobbers out when the Author sits down and pets her.

“So I learned today: Don’t tell that idiot Wade any plot-sensitive stuff. Or keep it short because we all suspect he’s ADHD, so I need to finish BEFORE that fucker leaps to conclusions.”

Mary whines.

“That’s actually sweet!” The Author grins and scratches one of the dog’s bald ears. “All right, babe, keep that energy when everyone ELSE starts calling him a dumbass.”

Appeased, Mary heads out the back door.

“Where are you going?!” The Author tries to scoop her up out of instinct, but again her hands go through Mary. “Goddamn it, BOTH of you can’t follow instructions!”

Dogpool is suddenly suited up with goggles, her jacket, and her booties. She barks and follows the wake of Wade’s car.

“OH, FUCK YOU TOO, CUNT!” The Author starts running after her.

—

Back in the shed, there’s more light, and the rain has slowed down to a drizzle.

“All right,” Blade says. “Godzilla is full by now. We can head out and start running again.”

“Running where?” Johnny points out.

“I hope we find a place with a working lock this time.” He takes the buntot-pagi out of the lock, stows it in a spare holster, and opens the creaking door.

The sunlight almost hurts after being in the dark for so long, but after being trapped in the shed, the cool air and the smell of the rain blows soft on their faces and into their chests.

Johnny smiles as if the wind is nothing on all that bare skin—or maybe he does feel it, because now he coils up with his hands trailing smoke on the door-frame.

Until Gambit rams into him, arms wrapped solid around his torso. “JOHNNY!”

“WHAT THE FUCK?!”

“Don’t you flame on right now, or Tick-Tock’s gonna find us!” Gambit refuses to let go until Johnny’s hands stop smoking.

“Oh!” He remembers, so his hands come away, flaking ash and paint chips. “Thanks, Sweetness. Damn it, are we really just running now? The normal way?”

“Well, unless you got keys for a getaway car hiding in all three feet of your suit? Yes, we are.” Elektra claps his shoulder.

“Fiiiiiiiiiiiiine.”

And so they start running.

Well, jogging—after all, they’re still tired and wet and hurt.

Plus, it’s not like they know where another abandoned house is yet.

—

On Deadpool’s premature quest, the streets are underwater, and since the ground isn’t acting right, he nearly rear-ends a stalled car.

“EXCUSE ME?” He honks, but the driver won’t move. He puts the car in park and gets out Baby Knife. “Bitch, I’m Marvel Jesus, and I need to rescue—owwww! What the fuck?!”

His feet are tingling and burning now that he’s close to the other car, and it would probably be a lot worse without his healing factor.

The driver is dead, but there’s no blood on him—just red lacy lines, and the blue tint of death on his skin. Across the street is what killed him: A downed and sparking power line.

“Oh! Baby girl asked medical students what happens with a giant malfunctioning pole that you should absolutely NOT TOUCH.” Wade winces and gets back in the car.

“Wade, you stupid bitch!” The Author appears next to him in the passenger’s seat. “This scene was supposed to be where the Resistance found out that the pangil ng kidlat protects you from lightning, but only one person can wear it. LUCKY FOR THEM, Gambit lives with a woman who makes storms, so he knows how to deal with charged ground! Now I gotta move that somewhere else, because YOU were supposed to stay home, and YOU can’t die!”

“But it still hurttttttttts,” Deadpool whines.

“Just go to Vanessa’s place.” The Author rubs her temples.

Mary Puppins barks from the backseat.

“My ray of sunshine!” Wade checks behind him and strains to grab her, with the car starting to jitter as it veers too far to the side.

“WADE, THE ROAD! LOOK AT THE ROAD!”

“Nobody can see the road, baby girl! You’re the one who made it rain in the worst way ever!” He retorts, and then settles Mary on his lap. “Beloved, how did you follow your dear papa?”

“Remember that she’s YOU,” the Author tells him.

—

In the wake of the buwaya’s rampage, the streets look as shitty as the Resistance feels.

They’ve been scoping out cars in case someone left their keys inside, but there’s been no luck. And with their latest target being a police car, they don’t want to try it. Even considering that nobody will come out if the alarm gets set off, that shit is LOUD. They’ve had enough of the rain, the wind, and a storm-spirit’s questions battering their ears.

“What’s this?” Gambit bends down and spots the sticker of a long white skull on the cop car’s window. “Now, what the hell. Why they put Frank’s skull on this bitch?”

This is no sign from the Punisher—just a sticker in the worst place possible. Soon, Eric and Elektra can feel the sudden, white-hot rage boiling off of Frank Castle’s ghost.

“I’ve seen cops with Punisher stuff,” Blade muses. “Some of them got a hard-on for what he does.”

“Well, Frank ain’t no cop-lover.” Gambit seethes. “And they don’t like me too much, neither!”

He drinks from his flask of palm wine again before hefting his staff like a spear: “Frank! I ain’t stole a car in a hot minute, but I’m getting back in the business for you!” He plunges it into the window.

In the shock of breaking glass, Frank’s spirit cools down—and Blade thinks he hears someone chuckle, as Gambit opens the door and sweeps out the shards with the offending sticker’s pieces.

“Time for a quick charge.” He flicks out a playing card from his sleeves, grins, and tears it in half. “Gonna be rough this way, but I ain’t sorry to make the police carpool for a while.”

“How you gonna start the car with no key?” Blade retorts.

He waves them off. “Everyone put your seat-belts on. Make sure it’s on park.”

After they’re in, the driver’s door stays open for him, and the parking brake is firmly set—Gambit double-checks through the window before he even opens the hood—he puts one half-card each on the battery terminals, and charges them up with two fingers.

In the wash of purple light, the card pieces don’t explode like usual—they sink into the battery instead, popping so many sparks that they rain onto the wet ground. And soon after Gambit thumps the car hood down, the engine all but booms, like a just-wakened beast.

“You said you were in the Thieves’ Guild! Not The Fast and the Furious!” Elektra accuses him from the backseat, already clutching the passenger handles.

“And we had more than a few car specialists, sha!” Gambit laughs as he jumps through the driver’s door and clips himself in.

“What the hell did you do to this thing, Remy?!” Blade winces as Gambit floors the gas pedal, and the car blasts off with a screech of tires.

He can smell everyone’s blood pressure spiking up against the roof as they roar down the street.

Except for Remy.

That damn boy just laughs.

—

“Oh, Gambit’s so good at stealing cars,” Deadpool says on his half of the traveling montage. “Do you have prior experience in grand theft auto, baby girl?”

“No, this is boring,” she admits. “My sister had a beater that just FAINTED if you looked at it wrong, so she didn’t want to keep calling her insurance for help.”

“I see we’re finally getting some cars on this road trip!” He says. “Also, why does Gambit hate cops?”

“I don’t know, why do you think a HOMELESS KID that grew up into a THIEF might not like law enforcement?” The Author retorts. “Wade Wilson, the world’s dumbest seer.”

“I’M A SEER?!” He puts his hands to his mouth. “Is that how the Fourth Wall manifests here?!”

“Yeah, there’s a theme about how seeing other worlds is intertwined with being crazy or god-touched, HINT-HINT,” she says. “Oh shit, Wade—”

“I’m just so touched that you would give Marvel Jesus, your lord and savior, even more power—”

“WADE! LEFT! GO LEFT!”

“Sorry!” He brakes and hauls at the steering wheel, curving far too slow before they hit a streetlight—and soon after that, a smoking police car nearly hits them.

“Damn it, we’re early!” The Author huffs. “Wade, play nice with everyone.”

The car stops, and a man in a trashed blue bodysuit heads over. “We’re so sorry, are you hurt—oh, fuck you, Deadpool!”

“Hey!” Deadpool holds up Mary Puppins. “We had a baby on board, least-popular Chris Evans!”

“Sure, dick for brains, I look like Captain America because I’m blonde!”

“What you doing all prettied up like that?” Gambit asks. “We got a storm spirit on the loose! Ain’t nobody fighting him!”

“I was on a quest!” Deadpool insists. “But in my magnanimity as Marvel Jesus, I shall concede—GET IN! GET IN MY CAR! RIGHT NOW!”

The smoke from the police car’s engine is gushing thick and black, with flames threatening to burst through the gaps in the hood. Once everyone’s in his own car, Deadpool rams the gas pedal again, watching as the smoking cop car gets smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror.

When they’re halfway down the block, it explodes in purple-toned mist.

“I didn’t do too bad for being out of practice,” Gambit chuckles. “We got at least five miles!”

“FIVE miles is good for your car-jumping?” Johnny wonders.

“It ain’t for cruising, angel, it’s for getting out of sight fast,” Gambit says. “Anyhow, we met up with a friend! We don’t gotta break into no buildings for the time being.”

“I’m a friend?!” Deadpool asks. “Gambit, would that make me, perhaps… an X-Man?!”

“You only a friend because Johnny happens to be alive again,” Gambit warns.

“After your dumb ass got him skinned, he got ate by that storm spirit up there,” Blade says, pointing up to the car roof.

“Am… am I going to be on probation for the X-Men—”

“Boy, Charles ain’t here right now! Don’t ask me nothing about it!” Gambit snaps.

“Oh, no! You and Logan keep talking about Charles Xavier’s absence from the story!” He checks the back seat, where the Author fumes. “Why is he so mean?!”

“Well, I believe in second chances, but I ain’t giving you no references just yet,” Gambit tells him.

“Is this going to be a motif, baby girl?!” Deadpool asks.

“God, he’s a dog parent,” Elektra says. “Deadpool. Give me the dog. You are DRIVING.”