Buying The Farm

by Mercutio

Domino awoke slowly, mind focusing dully on her situation.

Normally, her mind would have been springing to conclusions, eagerly accumulating data on her surroundings for use in keeping her alive -- a very handy trait for someone in her profession --but not right at the moment. Domino felt as though she'd been drugged and then buried alive.

Of course, that was an unlikely possibility, wasn't it?

She thought hard, trying to concentrate on the last event she could clearly recollect. Nathan. Domino remembered being exhausted, and trying to put that exhaustion aside to go on a mission over his protests that she should just get some rest -- and then he'd handed her something to drink and... And there her memories stopped. It was easy to deduce what had happened next.

Very funny, big guy. Drug me to keep me out of the way. She felt a sudden surge of affection for Cable. He did have such a way with women, now didn't he? Had to drug them to get them into bed at all, and then he left them alone when he had them at his mercy. Yes, she decided, she'd have to tease him about that when she saw him next.

Whenever she got out of here. Wherever here was.

It was dark; opening her eyes gave her no better view than she'd had with them shut. Domino tried to move and found, after bashing her head on the extremely low ceiling, that she was confined inside a metal cube only somewhat larger than her body. She had room to squirm, possibly turn over, but not much more than that. Her feet and hands met solid metal wherever she could reach.

Great joke, she thought, rolling her eyes. This was what she got for hanging around with mercs. They had the worst senses of humor ever. Obviously they'd taken advantage of her unconscious situation and had set this up to score some points off of her in retaliation for her own practical jokes.

That had to be the explanation for her current situation. Right?

I wonder if there are any air holes in here, she thought, and then the situation ceased to be funny any longer.

****

"How much longer does he have?" Scott asked Hank anxiously, as he labored over his patient, attempting to stop the coughing. "If Forge can't finish his device before Nathan..." he broke off, unable to say the word 'dies'.

"I would estimate not long at all, my friend--" The blue-furred doctor began compassionately, then halted as the sound of coughing halted abruptly. "Ah, better. The less he coughs, the longer Nathan will continue to share this existence with us."

"How much of his lung capacity does he have left?"

McCoy consulted a read-out. "I... the equipment must be malfunctioning."

Scott was around the bed and at his side instantly. "What does it say?" he asked, voice hard.

"The degeneration has momentarily stabilized. My stars. The tissue appears to actually be regenerating."

"Thank God," Scott said, slumping against a wall, some of the pent-up tension suddenly draining from his body.

#Dom--?# came a faint telepathic communication from Cable.

Cyclops closed his eyes against the wall of pain that assaulted him -- not from Nathan, but from himself, as he realized that Cable had forgotten about the death of his partner and was asking about her again. Scott pulled himself to stand where his son could see him and bent over the bed. "Nathan -- Domino is...is dead."

#No!#

He clasped Nathan's hand. "I'm sorry." Nathan's face hardened, and suddenly Scott received a single image instead of words. "No. We didn't. We couldn't have."

He straightened and raced for the door.

McCoy regarded his patient with curiosity. "As much as I am grateful that you appear to be resting more easily, what exactly did you say to our Fearless Leader to incite him to such precipitous action?"

Nathan did not reply, but a small smile began to touch the corners of his mouth.

****

The occupant of the second bed in the Infirmary began to harangue the occupant of the first bed. "Do you know what it's like to wake up in what looks like your own coffin? Not to mention how cold it was in that damned morgue. It wasn't terribly bright of you to drug me."

Nathan simply looked at her, cherishing the sight of the woman he'd thought to be dead.

"I'm seriously thinking about joining up with Wade Wilson,"Domino said conversationally. "He might have the world's most annoying personality, and you can't trust him -- but at least if Deadpool had put me on ice, it would have been *on purpose*. Can't trust any of you to even do a decent check for vital signs apparently."

After Domino's rescue from the cold box that her body had been put in for temporary storage, McCoy had sworn to all and sundry that his checks had been thorough and that Domino had been, as far as his medical knowledge extended, dead. Nathan did not doubt him-- she had been far enough down that he had lost his psychic link to her. Only after her awakening and subsequent call to him had he known different, and of all people, he should have known. Of course, it was still fortunate for the Beast that Domino had not gone into the morgue armed.

Domino continued her dressing down. "Good thing for you that drug you slipped me had taken my metabolism down, and kept me from inhaling too much of that smoke -- do you know what I would have done to you if I hadn't revived from your stupid stunt?"

#You would have been dead, Dom.#

"Well, I would've come back as a ghost and haunted you then. You can't get rid of me that easily, Summers."

He was in trouble now. But it was a good kind of trouble. #Love you, too, Dom,# he sent, before falling into a peaceful slumber.

-the end-

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