in technicolor

Brett had never once claimed to know a damn thing about the nitty-gritty details of mutants or mutations or anything like that, which was why he was surprised when the Captain called him over and asked him specifically if he knew if the night crew’s powers had changed at all since he’d started to get to know them.

The idea that mutations did and could change over time was like a slap to the face.

In hindsight, after the Captain had accepted his ‘I don’t actually know, sir’ and moved on, it made perfect sense that they would.

Bodies changed.

Bodies got older.

Hormones did all kind of mystical things. Same with skin. Eyes. Hair.

Why shouldn’t someone’s enhancements change too?

Foggy stared at him emptily for a good three beats over the top of his glass of cider at Josie’s that night before snapping out of it and saying,

“Fuck.”

He then stuffed everything he had into his leather bag and Brett had to chug his own pint before chasing after.

Matt stared about a hundred times more emptily more or less at both of them in his doorway before whispering “Oh my god” and grabbing a scarf to head down the road to Jessica Jones’s place.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Jones sniffed at Matt who, upon getting a good whiff of her ‘what the fuck is the matter with you’ vibe, had stolen a swallow of her whiskey straight from the tumbler in her hand.

“Has yours not?” she asked Matt with a cock of her head.

“I don’t know,” Matt said. “I guess I haven’t thought about it. There’s always so much to like, process, and so many ways to do it, that it never occurred to me that I might be doing it differently from before.”

Huh.

“Has yours changed?” Brett asked.

Jones shrugged.

“In some ways,” she said. “Can’t drink as much as I used to.”

Uh?

She’d been drinking more before this?

“Yeah,” Jones said. “Way more. Now, it’s like two bottles and I’m ready for a nap. Used to put back three easy.”

Three??

Jesus Christ.

Matt made a contemplative noise and scratched at the scruff on his face.

“Maybe something has changed,” he mumbled.

“Oh no, definitely changed,” Danny said. “The force used to knock me back. Threw me into a pond once.”

His own hand?

“Oh, yeah,” Danny said cheerfully. “It’s a lot to have to contain. You gotta focus really hard. Really works out your neck. I’ve put on hella muscle since I got it.”

Huh.

Danny accepted the tumbler Jones dumped a couple of fingers of whiskey into and took a sip. He grimaced and licked his lips then discreetly passed it over to Matt.

Brett glanced over at Foggy who pouted his way in thought.

“Well, like, in the immediate sense, their bodies would have to compensate for whatever it is they’re carrying around, right?” Foggy said.

They’d dropped Matt off home to go ruminate on his life and its choices. He’d been quiet all evening, trying to feel himself through to figure out if anything felt different that it used to.

Jones wondered if the scar tissue and callouses that decorated the guy’s hands and knuckles had changed his ability to feel in any way and since then, Matt had been preoccupied with picking things up and doing his hyperfocus thing with his brows drawn low in the object’s general direction.

“I guess maybe any changes that happened after that would be kind of like changes to your eyesight,” Brett hypothesized. “Like, maybe they happen so slowly you don’t even notice them until you need to do something that specifically involves them.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Foggy said, looking out into the street. “Must be hard for kids. Hormonal changes and all that.”

Yeah.

Yeah, actually, it would be wouldn’t it?

Brett found Peter the next Thursday, unusually sans mask, sitting on the floor of Nelson, Murdock, & Page after hours, filing paperwork with his friends. He didn’t understand Brett’s question. Not even after Foggy tried to rephrase it in a couple of different ways.

“I guess sometimes I feel kind of sick,” Peter eventually offered.

“Sick?” Brett tried.

“Like,” Peter waved the folder he was holding at the space in front of him. “Things get all spinny.”

“The spins,” Matt agreed on his way out of his shoebox office.

“The spins,” Peter repeated sagely. “And I feel like I’m gonna puke and sometimes I do, but sometimes I don’t.”

“Some foods make me feel like that,” Matt said offhandedly as he dug through a pile of folders on the secretary’s desk.

“Which ones?” Peter’s friend Michelle asked.

Matt hummed.

“Edible flowers,” he said. “Bitter melon. Fava beans.”

“Chestnuts,” Peter offered.

Chestnuts?

“Yeah, they’re awful,” Peter huffed. “Just the smell of ‘em. Ugh.”

Huh. Why was that raising flags in Brett’s head?

“Hey Ma?” he asked that weekend. “You know anything about chestnuts making people sick?”

His mom and sister gave him twin looks of confusion.

“Sick?” Kelly repeated. “I mean, if you’re allergic to nuts, maybe?”

No, Peter wasn’t allergic to nuts. That was Cap. Cap’s serum helped him out in that department these days, but ever since the collar situation, the poor guy had been pretty scarred by his close calls with anaphylactic shock. Brett had seen a picture of him being highly suspicious of a piece of cake at a fancy gala thing in the news the other day.

“No, I just mean like, inducing nausea,” he said. “The Spiderkid told me the other day that chestnuts make him sick.”

“Well that’d make sense,” his mom said. “Chestnuts ward spiders away, you know?”

Did they?

“Yes, that’s why I’ve always kept some around in the winter, you never noticed?”

Well, no. Apparently not.

Peter was dumbfounded upon receiving this information and abandoned Brett and Foggy and their day drinking to go frantically google it and text his aunt.

He came skidding by the restaurant Brett and Foggy were judging harshly with his buddies in tow about an hour later with a horrified expression on his face.

“Am I gonna grow more legs?” he asked the two of them over the restaurant’s dumb little barricade. It was covered in herbs that had definitely been bought just that weekend from Home Depot.

“Probably,” Foggy said.

“Dude,” Brett scolded.

“Maybe some more eyes too,” Foggy continued nonchalantly as he picked through his drenched salad for salvageable croutons.

“Oh my god,” Peter whimpered, then tore off with his friends back from whence he’d come.

“Detective, what if I start to nest?” Peter asked him in the middle of a crime scene that week. Everyone at the scene, officers and forensic folk alike, stared at the kid hanging upside down in Brett’s face.

“I?” Brett stammered.

“What if I start to eat bugs?” Peter continued. “What if I start to eat birds, detective?”

“You already eat birds,” Brett pointed out as tactfully as he could.

The silence and stillness of the scene around them remained so as Peter processed this information.

“Good day, officer,” he finally said before vanishing.

His sister thought that this was a fuckin’ hoot, but Brett’s mom was more sympathetic to Spidey’s anxiety.

“Must be hard for him,” she said, “No rules. No role models. He’s what, just sixteen?”

“It’s not that he’s got no role models; it’s just that everyone’s got different powers,” Brett told her. Kelly handed him another dish to dry. Amos and his friend screamed at the tv in the living room.

“That doesn’t help too much if you don’t know what’s happening to you,” his mom pointed out. “I mean, what if he gets sick with something that only he can get? What is he supposed to do then?”

Good point.

Hmm.

“Matt makes himself sick all the time,” Foggy told him later over the counter at Nelson’s Hardware. His folks were off on their yearly week-long vacation. Fogs and Candace usually took over the store in their absence, even though the handful of employees the Nelsons had could probably handle it just fine.

It soothed the parents, Foggy said, ergo it needed to be done.

“Right, from bitter melon,” Brett said. A toddler went by the counter dragging a saw and a frantic dad crashed out of aisle four to give chase.

“Mm, I mean, that’s him pretending not to be weird,” Foggy said. “I’ve caught him trying to eat dried bay leaves before.”

Dude.

“I know. Bergamot is another one. If he finds one at a market, he’ll try to eat it raw, every time,” Foggy sighed.

“The fuck is Bergamot?” Brett asked.

“The shit that makes Earl Grey tea smell fancy. I dunno, man, he loves it.”

Ah.

Wait.

“Does he try to eat tea?”

“Wouldn’t put it past him.”

Weird.

“Yeah, I think it’s ‘cause his sense of smell and his sense of taste are even more wrapped up together than the rest of us,” Foggy hummed. “So like, he’s chill with drinking vanilla extract and munching on lavender while the rest of us err on the smelling side of that kind of thing. And I mean, if we’re talking just weird food behavior, Matt’ll eat whole lemons and raw onion without batting an eye. He hates rosemary, won’t touch it. Parsley, too. We’ve got a vendetta against parsley in the office right now, which is extra weird because this is the same guy who used to survive off super-green salad in law school, and I swear he used to stuff parsley in those things.”

“Cilantro,” Brett pointed out.

“No,” Foggy said. “Parsley.”

“Definitely cilantro.”

“What? You a chef now? A botanist? Botanist Brett with his big bags of bad ideas? No. It was parsley.”

Well, there was no need to get nasty, Mr. Nelson. Also, how much is this rake?

It came to Brett’s attention that Wade Wilson and Sam Wilson were locked in a battle of wills (son?).

He wasn’t sure why. Fogs knew fuck all about it. Matt seemed to know what was going on, but he was playing dumb and dodging questions by picking at people’s clothes and trying to guess their colors again.

Karen was the one who’d brought it to Brett’s attention. She claimed that she’d heard from Castle that the feud was getting in the way of his work. She said it was some kind of counselor thing.

Sam Wilson, once he was on a healing warpath, apparently could not be stopped.

Funny how you only know one side of people.

Whatever it was that Sam wanted from Wade, he’d found that he could want it from Castle, too, and now both of them were bitching and moaning about that damn staff sergeant who wouldn’t leave them the fuck alone.

Brett tried to ask Peter about it for the new and improved notebook that he’d been handed by the Captain for the fall, but Peter just asked him if he too, thought that mint was super off-putting sometimes. Like, even in toothpaste. Wasn’t it weird how 90% of toothpastes were mint-flavored? Wasn’t that strange, detective?

Suspicious even, sir?

Brett checked later and found that mint was also a natural spider-repellant.

He felt bad for awakening all these new anxieties in this poor boy.

Luke Cage told him a few days later at the scene of a break-in that he was trying to get in touch with Sam Wilson and he was willing to chat with Brett about this whole mutation-research that people said he was doing.

Brett didn’t know how he felt about the fact that his doings had become part of the rumor mill of the underground, but he figured, what the hell? Why not?

Cage was a pretty hard nut to crack when it came to cooperating with the police. He wasn’t as talkative as Danny or Jones, although you wouldn’t know it from the way that Danny nattered about their misadventures.

“Oh yeah, mine’s changed,” Cage said as Brett wrote. “Seem to get stronger all the time. It’s a little unnerving if I’m honest.”

No shit?

How long has that been going on, then?

“As long as I’ve had the enhancement,” Cage said. “Sometimes, I feel like being around others who are enhanced has some kind of effect on it, too. Like when the four of us—me, Jess, Danny and Murdock—are running around together, there’s just this feeling. I don’t know how to describe it. Might just be psychological, some kind of solidarity thing. Maybe feeling less self-conscious about not holding back. Who knows?”

Who knows, indeed?

That was fascinating, though.

What if enhancements did actually respond to each other? What if they fed off the ones around them? What if that’s why enhanced vigilantes were drawn towards each other and seemed to regularly form teams?

Hm.

Well, there was one person who Brett could ask about that.

Matt was being purposefully obtuse, Brett could pinpoint this now. He didn’t want to talk any more about his abilities and since an incident with a shitty cop in the Kitchen the week before, which had resulted in Matt nursing yet another bullet graze, he didn’t seem so hot on talking to any cop, even the one his partner was friends with.

His body language and question-deflecting all pointed to one thing and that was a neon sign reading ‘FUCK OFF.’

He tried to steal Brett’s notebook and then climbed up some fire-escapes and huddled in, up high, pouting down at Brett until he threw in the towel and accepted that he wasn’t getting anything productive out of Matt for the evening.

The next logical choice was Peter but Peter was…Peter.

Anxious.

Brett seriously felt like he’d unlocked a door or something in this kid’s head.

“I can’t see things so hot,” Peter informed him stiffly.

“In what way?” Brett forced himself to ask.

“Things up close,” Peter said. “I can’t see them. They’re all blurry.”

This sounded like a personal problem?

“But I can see far away super well,” Peter complained.

Well that explained a lot. The being up high thing, for example.

“You think I’m gonna grow more eyes?”

O-kay. Bedtime for you, little one.

“Will they grow on my face?” Peter asked.

Brett  was not even attempting to entertain that Lovecraftian horror show. No thanks.

He remembered abruptly that Wade Wilson himself worked on multiple teams. Then he remembered that finding Wade was a pain in the ass and half.

God, why did this have to be so difficult?

He settled on asking Cap because he and Cap had a certain kind of rapport now.

Cap was a great resource when he was in the mood for sharing. And if you discounted the fact that he adamantly refused to share most of his life with anyone, up to and including his partners, that made him a pretty damn good option.

Cap was also interesting because really, he was the first guy who’d made it into this business as far as Brett understood it. Not the first mutant, but certainly the first enhanced person to survive the enhancement process and definitely one of the longest-living ones.

He went to see Cap out of academic and personal curiosity but found himself drawn into the Wilson v. Wilson feud.

“It’s okay,” JB consoled him, “It happens to all of us. Sammy’s got laser eyes for weakpoints.”

How the fuck had he even gotten here?

“You want to help people, detective,” JB said smoothly. “Whatever that means. Doesn’t matter. Sam’s not interested in the method, he’s interested in the result.”

Sam Wilson was going to make a damn fine Captain America soon here if he kept that attitude up.

Sam tromped down the stairs in his full Falcon gear and pointed a confident finger at Brett.

“Wilson tolerates you,” he informed Brett.

“Tolerates is generous,” Brett said. “I just happen to be personally connected to two of his teammates.”

“Tolerates,” Sam insisted. “You’re going to help me.”

Well, yes. That had been Brett’s impression here.

“The man needs therapy.”

Yes, yes. That was pretty clear.

“He’s a US vet. He has earned the right for VA services.”

Oh, no shit?

“God help me, he will get those damn services.”

Uh.

So, counselor?

Pretty sure that’s not how seeking mental health support works.

“This is being proactive,” Sam said. “Wilson is a danger to himself and society in his current state. He needs medication and trauma counseling.”

Yes, yes. That was good and true and all that, but Wade also had a mighty need to eviscerate other humans so that he could continue to afford his daily bread, so?

“We’ll work on that,” Sam said. “Talk about life choices and professional development.”

Yeah, no.

Brett could totally see why Frank and Wade regarded Sam with barely concealed disgust.

But whatever. That wasn’t his damn problem.

“Okay?” he said. “Have you told this to Spidey?”

“Peter is a minor,” Sam said.

“Peter is one of two minors that Wade’s taken under his wing,” Brett informed him.

He got two highly quizzical and alarmed expressions at this fact.

“Two?” JB repeated.

“Yes. Peter and a young man named Russell,” Brett said. “He’s been sighted accompanying Wade and his other team on a few missions.

Sam was scandalized.

“This is a pattern,” he snapped at JB who threw up his hands to indicate where he stood on the matter. “This is unsafe behavior. For the kids, man. Think of the kids.”

Brett was. That was kind of the point.

“Wade’s gone far out of his way on multiple occasions to protect Peter,” Brett pointed out. “He cares a great deal about the kid, and I would be surprised if he didn’t feel similarly towards Russell. So if you’re talking strategy, Sam, your best bet might be to get the kids onto your side and let them pressure Wade into seeing your way of things.”

Sam said nothing, then turned around to bop back up the stairs. he cackled and disappeared back into the bedroom he’d come out of. Brett heard the distinct sound of Kevlar being chucked onto the floor.

“Well, now you’ve done it,” JB sighed.

Yikes.

“Right,” Brett said, valiantly ignoring the disaster which he’d just put into the making, “Is Steve around?”

JB sucked in a breath through his teeth.

“He is,” he said. “But I dunno if you’re gonna get very far with him.”

Steve had locked himself in his studio over the last couple of days and was busy furiously reading and rereading the works of Karl Marx.

He’d been arguing with his accountant for days, trying to break off all his royalty contracts.

“We’ve recently gotten word that we are, as Papa Marx would say, of the bourgeois classes these days, and so we’ve decided that now is the time to remember our socialist roots and the time our mama spent in the IRA,” JB explained diplomatically as he knocked on the studio door.

Ah.

No one answered.

JB leaned in towards the door and called, “Steven? A member of the surveillance state is here. Are you cool to engage?”

Nothing.

“Okay, well, can I, fellow class-traitor, come in?” JB asked.

A sound of anguish burst out from behind the door.

“It’s gonna be okay, honey,” JB said. “There are ways to use capital for the common good.”

The door unlocked and Steve glared out from the two inches of space he was willing to give Brett.

“I hate this society,” he said with zero affect.

“I hate it sometimes, too,” Brett told him. “Can I ask you some personal questions?”

Steve claimed that yeah, his enhancement did actually feel different with different people around him, now that he thought about it.

“Like, me and Nat? Good. Me, Buck, and Sam? Could take on the world. But me and Thor? It’s like you’re unstoppable. Everything is possible. He’s just so—I dunno what he radiates, but it just makes everything feel within reach. It’s like when we’re fighting together, I just feel like we’re approaching this peak, where my body can do anything I ask it to. I feel stronger and faster and just, in control,” Steve explained with his hands flailing around.

Huh.

“But is Thor technically enhanced?” Brett asked.

“Thor’s a demigod,” Steve told him. “He is as enhanced as you can get while being mortal.”

Damn. Okay.

“So would you say that your own enhancements have changed over time?” Brett asked.

Steve rubbed his knuckles under his chin while he thought about it.

“Maybe?” he said. “I dunno, sometimes I think that the serum’s wearing off. I’m just.” He deflated and shifted his shoulders so that they hung low and loose. “I get tired these days. I never used to feel tired. I used to have to sleep not even half as much as others. But these days.” Steve sighed.

“Sam says I’m depressed. He said that that’s what’s driving this kind of thing, and like. He’s right, but also I’ve got this gut feeling, detective. Like it’s all going to come crashing down on me. The longer it goes on, the more tired I feel. I’m not as old as you think, I wasn’t awake in the ice. I’m not even forty up here, you know.” He tapped at his temple. Then dropped his fingers and his eyes. “Bucky’s way older. He was awake. He’ll know better. He gets tired too these days. His healing factor isn’t what it used to be.”

Brett left the Cap residence with his notebook in hand, a bad taste in his mouth, and a weight in his belly.

If Cap was right, then what would happen to him when the serum finally wore off?

Would he die?

Or would he just suffer for the rest of however long it took him to reach old age?

The man had already been alive for a century, to force him to endure another in ill health seemed cruel. Cruel and unusual.

And that was just Cap. What would happen to the others? What if one day the mutations kept changing and transforming to the point where Peter’s worst nightmares actually came true.

Was this a slow process into making these people into the monsters they fought?

Fuck.

No wonder the boy was fixating.

There is nothing scarier than becoming the villain of your own story.

He found Wade accidentally. Or rather Wade found him. It was hard to care and he felt too heavy to ask any more questions that day.

“It keeps changing, detective,” Wade said.

The rumor mill of the underworld must have really been churning. Wade already knew his questions.

“So I’ve gathered,” Brett said.

He didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It was making him feel like shit and there was not a whole lot he could do here to help anyone.

Wade made a sound that Brett realized belatedly was a sigh. His armor rasped as he folded himself down to join Brett on the park bench.

It was dark.

Wade’s time of night.

The concrete path that wound through the little grassy space looked blue. Almost like a tiny, rushing river.

“It’s not anything special, Mahoney,” Wade said. “It’s not just mutations that change. People change. Every second of every day. We shed skin cells every minute. Change clothes. Change our brains—always deciding what’s wrong and what’s right, day by day. There’s always new shit that we’ve gotta be wrapping our minds around. How to be old, how to be sick, how to be healthy, how to talk to other people. Hey, you ever heard the saying that you never step into the same river twice?”

The person sitting next to him wasn’t Deadpool.

“I’ve heard it,” Brett said.

This man was a vet. A young man still, technically, who’d spent his youth bathed in trauma and his present days drenched in blood.

He’d seen and he’d taken more lives than even Brett, professional homicide detective, had and would ever, God willing.

“My old pal Lucky used to say that that was bullshit, there’s only so much water on earth. You’re gonna encounter the same water somewhere, at some point,” Wade said.

Brett chuffed a laugh.

“Was Lucky your dad?” he asked.

Wade snorted.

“Not the point. What I’m trying to say is that if you ain’t some forest asshole named Lucky, and you’re down with that hippie logic around rivers, then it only makes sense that you never meet the same person twice. Not even the folks you’ve grown up with or partnered yourself to. So gettin’ yourself all up and twisted over whether or not us poor mutated saps got it hard or harder than anyone else ain’t doing nothing for no one. The facts as they are, Mahoney, are that you shouldn’t be pityin’ all these folks because they’re gonna shrivel away with their mutations.”

Wade peeled off his mask and leaned his chin on his palm. His elbow on his knee.

“They’re gonna die young,” he said. “That’s what we really oughta be pityin’ ‘em for.”

Wade Wilson was a man who could never die.

He was more immortal that even Thor.

“How are you gonna die, Wade?” Brett asked.

Wade scoffed.

“Well, I ain’t,” he said. “Not ‘til my work here is done. So long as business is good, I got a reason to be here. But the second the killin’ and maimin’ ain’t fun anymore, well, you can count me out.”

Brett watched him.

“But how?” he asked.

Wade’s shoulders heaved.

“Can’t tell you, detective,” he said. “Or else I’d have to kill you.”

Yeah.

Yeah, because if anyone else knew, then Wade wouldn’t be the one in control anymore.

Brett leaned back against the bench. Wade stayed with him for another few minutes, then redonned his mask and stood up, Deadpool again.

“Sam fuckin’ Wilson’s corruptin’ my kids,” Wade informed him. “You got anything to do with that?”

“He wants to help you,” Brett said.

“Yeah, I know,” Wade groused. “Shit’s annoying as hell. And going through the kids? Man, that’s low.”

Ehn, not really.

“I’ll tell him to go through Red next time,” Brett said.

“Oh, hell no. Red’s soft as butter. The second Wilson realizes that, he’s a goner.”

Yeah, fair.

“Hey, tell him to go through Cable,” Wade decided. “Nate’ll love that.”

Brett chuckled.

He didn’t doubt it.

“Tell me,” Peter said, holding Matt’s face with just enough superstrength that he couldn’t escape no matter how hard he struggled.

Foggy bit his lip and looked over to Brett.

“You need something, detective?” he asked pleasantly. Happy to be back in the office and not standing at a till all day in a bright red apron, probably.

Technically, Brett needed one of these idiots to confirm his current suspect’s gang membership, but honestly? This was a much better use of his time.

“Tell me,” Peter insisted.

“Kid, you have two fuckin’ eyes, no one knows this better than you,” Matt snarled.

“That’s not the question,” Peter snarled right back.

“You smell normal. You sound normal. You’re not turning into a goddamned spider, alright?”  

“If I lay eggs at any point in the next year, this will be on you, you hear me?” Peter threatened. “I’ve asked. I’ve sought help. If it happens, it is not my fault and I will not hear a single egg-joke from either you or the abominable DP, are we clear?”

“Let go, for god’s sake, you tiny demon.”

“Are we clear, Devil?”

“For fuck’s sake—yes. Yes, we’re clear. Get off already.”

Yeah, a much, much better use of his time.