Replay
by Alicia McKenzie
DISCLAIMER: Characters belong to Marvel, and are used without permission for entertainment purposes only. Set sometime after the Age of Apocalypse, while X-Force was living at the mansion.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I'm making rather a habit of Danger Room-themed stories, aren't I? Ah, well. This one's for Redhawk. :)
Coughing, Bishop pushed himself up out of the rubble, shaking his head doggedly to clear it. The blurriness left his vision, and he saw what he always saw at the end of this program, the image that had long since burned itself into his mind; Randall and Malcolm, his men, his friends, laying dead. Just like always. In all the times he'd run this Danger Room program, he'd never been able to change the ending of this firefight. Different choices, different tactics--none of it ever mattered. It always ended this way, with them dying in the hail of bullets meant for him.
Even so, he could never bring himself to stop trying. Getting slowly to his feet, he turned away from the bodies of his squad members, distancing himself from the dull pain and simmering anger he felt at the sight. It was only an echo of what he'd felt that night; he was used to it by now, and there was one sure way to banish it.
"Computer," he said bluntly, bending over to pick up his weapon. "Reinitiate program." His surroundings began to wave, rippling like mirages seen in the desert, and Bishop took a deep breath, pushing everything extraneous to arms' length as he hardened himself to the task at hand. He was an officer of the X.S.E., about to go into battle with the members of his squad--
#No,# a deep, harsh voice said inside his mind, #you're a stubborn son of a flonq doing your very best to try and drive yourself insane.#
Bishop turned slowly in the direction of the observation booth, directing a hard look at his uninvited - and decidedly unwanted - audience. "There is a reason I reserve Danger Room time when I wish to run a private program," he said coldly, knowing Cable would hear him. "Leave."
Surprisingly, Cable promptly turned and vanished from sight. Shaking his head, Bishop took a moment to check his weapon. He was not looking for approval; he knew very well how most of the inhabitants of the mansion regarded his use of this program. The lectures were growing tiresome, at best, and something about Cable's contemptuous, judgmental comment rankled deeply.
The Danger Room doors slid open, and Bishop stared disbelievingly at Cable as the older man strode through calmly and looked around at the frozen ruins of the dance club, shaking his head. Without a word, he walked right up to Randall and Malcolm's bodies and stood over them for a moment, the corner of his mouth curling upwards in what couldn't really be called a smile.
"I asked you to leave," Bishop said through gritted teeth, feeling his patience diminishing quickly.
"No," Cable said, "you ordered me to leave." He looked up at Bishop, that not-smile growing slightly. "Have you figured it out? The problem, I mean."
"I see. You came down here to irritate me, simply because I was brusque. Petty of you," Bishop said in disgust.
"Don't be ridiculous. I didn't mean that," Cable said, looking back at Randall and Malcolm. "This problem," he said, gesturing at the holographic corpses. "You've run the program often enough that you should have, unless you're a complete tactical idiot. So tell me, Bishop," Cable said, his voice taking on a slightly savage, yet strangely lecturing tone, "where did you go wrong?"
Bishop stared at him for a long moment, not quite able to believe the gall of the man. "I am not discussing this with you," he said curtly, keeping his temper tightly under control. Getting into an argument with him would be pointless--and perhaps what Cable wanted in the first place, Bishop thought suddenly. He knew when someone was trying to provoke him. "Leave. Now."
"I see," Cable said gravely, stepping around the corpses casually. "I've intruded on your private little ritual of self-flagellation and now you're feeling threatened. Consider me awash in self-recrimination." He grinned suddenly, rakishly. "Like my McCoy impression?"
"It needs work," Bishop said dourly, putting his weapon up and looking around. "What did you do to my program?" He couldn't quite keep the hint of anger out of his voice.
"Hit the pause button. You can start it again, anytime you want." Cable walked over and stood beside the remnants of an interior wall, well clear of where the firefight took place within the simulation. "Well?" he said mildly when Bishop continued to stare at him. "Go ahead. Start it."
Bishop glared at him for a moment longer, and decided he wasn't going to play whatever game Cable had in mind. So he had an audience. That didn't mean he had to acknowledge it.
"Computer, restart program," he said, and it began again. He fell into his role easily. An actor would have envied him; he knew every word by heart, recalled every motion flawlessly. He had manipulated and altered every variable in the simulation time and time again.
He staggered as he was blasted from behind, and as Styglut grabbed his attacker and started to rail at him for his foolishness, Bishop made a choice he'd made a few dozen times before and used the energy he'd just absorbed to take him down. Before he rallied his fellow criminals, before he could even begin to point out that projectile weapons were the answer.
It changed nothing. Another stepped smoothly into Styglut's place, as if the realization of how to turn the tide of battle had been inevitable, and the criminals focused their projectile fire on Bishop and his squad. Bishop didn't wait to order Randall and Malcolm to take cover; he lunged at them instead, intending to knock them flat.
Too late.
"Pause program," he heard Cable say, his voice almost eerily calm, and yet perfectly audible over the dying screams of the criminals who'd been killed in the firefight. Silence fell as soon as he gave the command, and Bishop, in disbelief, heard Cable chuckle wryly. "Well, there's something to be said for persistence, I suppose. Not very much, but something."
Bishop growled a curse under his breath and hauled himself to his feet. "If you wish to remain, do not interfere!" he snapped.
"Or what?" Cable raised one silver eyebrow, and looked past Bishop at Randall and Malcolm's bodies. "You'll throw me out? That would be productive. Almost as productive as this." He gave Bishop a measuring look. "You've tried that before--shooting their leader. Am I right?"
"That is none of your concern," Bishop almost snarled.
Cable actually rolled his eyes at him. "Just answer my question," he said with a sigh.
Bishop bit back the response he would have preferred to make. "Yes," he said tersely, and left it at that. He would not give Cable the satisfaction of any further emotional responses.
"Along with just about everything else, I'd imagine," Cable said casually. Bishop nodded briefly, and Cable shook his head. He strode over to one of the dead criminals, pulling the gun out of the corpse's hands. Bishop watched him check it--and then brought his own gun up sharply as Cable leveled the weapon at him.
They stood there, keeping each other in their sights for a long, tense moment, until Cable lowered the gun with a faint smile. "If I'd fired right away, you'd be dead," he said calmly.
"Very likely," Bishop growled, lowering his gun somewhat cautiously. Cable was known to be unpredictable, but this was pushing it, in his opinion. "But you didn't."
"Of course I didn't. That doesn't change anything. You weren't expecting an attack," Cable pointed out, tossing the gun back to the floor. "You reacted about as fast as I figured you would. You'd have certainly gotten a shot off, possibly even a killing one, but you would have fallen first." Cable met his eyes, his expression unreadable. "It's not a good illustration--there's a difference between your program and defending yourself against a lunatic who picks up a gun in a Danger Room scenario and tries to shoot you, right out of the blue. Still--just now, the point was to defend yourself, and you didn't succeed. But in the program, the point was to kill the enemy, and you did. It's all a question of what you're willing to trade to achieve your goal."
Bishop stared at him stonily. Cable stared right back, apparently unbothered by the silence. Ready to wait him out, Bishop thought, and felt his already-powerful irritation with the situation increase another notch or three.
"I do not require lectures on combat philosophy from you, Cable," he said coldly. "Or a 'pep talk'."
"No, you don't," Cable said evenly. "You need a good solid kick in the ass. Or the head." He gestured around at the frozen program, shaking his head again. "This is the Danger Room, Bishop. To all your senses, this is probably an exact replica of that day, but I can guarantee you, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of factors that you didn't take into account when you wrote this program."
"I have included everything that's relevant," Bishop snapped. He'd spent days creating this program, recreating that day down to even the small details that had had no impact whatsoever on the firefight.
"Flonq that," Cable scoffed. "You've included everything you THINK is relevant, Bishop." He smiled thinly. "I've spent years fighting beside the living embodiment of random chance. Unless you have a Domino in your pocket, you won't have a dozen apparently insignificant events combining to work in your favor, but even one or two can have a disproportionate impact. Chaos theory, Bishop."
"Your point?" He hadn't programmed the Danger Room to insert any random elements, but he'd been right to do so; luck hadn't intervened for Randall and Malcolm that day, and to allow it to do so in the program would have been cold comfort indeed, even if it had changed the ending.
"Stop asking rhetorical questions. You know flonqing well what my point was," Cable snapped. "Let's move on, shall we? I stood up there and watched you run this program five times before I spoke up to let you know I was there. Not once did you start it at a point before you entered the club. Why not?"
"Because it doesn't matter," Bishop grated, hating the way he'd straightened to attention, half-instinctively, at Cable's tone. The older man had sounded exactly like an X.S.E. instructor for a moment there.
"Pipe," Cable said crisply. "Absolute pipe. You're willing to fiddle with variables within the firefight itself for months on end, but you've closed your mind to looking back to the point where real changes could have been made. Fine. I won't require you to strain yourself, then. Yet." He paced off the distance between where the front rank of the criminals had stood, and where Bishop's squad had fallen, muttering to himself. "All right," he finally continued, "since we're sticking to the firefight itself, I have one question."
It occurred to him to suggest what Cable could do with his question, but that would be less than productive, and despite himself, Bishop was almost curious. "Yes?" he asked, calmly enough, but Cable's response sent a cold shock through him.
"What the hell did you think you were doing?"
Bishop stared at him blankly. "I beg your pardon?" he grated.
Cable was looking around at the remains of the club measuringly, seemingly ignorant of the reaction he had provoked. "Three on--what, twenty-five, thirty? Out in the open with no cover?" His lip curled, almost in disgust. "I suppose I could point out the number of innocent civilian bystanders, but that'd be going off on a tangent, wouldn't it? We're dealing with you and your squad and why you decided on a full frontal assault in a situation like this."
"It was necessary," Bishop said, biting back anger again. He would not go any further to justify himself to someone who had no right to question his decisions.
"No, that it wasn't. It was idiotic," Cable shot back.
"What would you have done?" Bishop countered, keeping his anger under tight control. "These were the worst of the escapees from my time, Cable. Murderers, fanatics--the longer they remained free in this time, the more damage they could do, both to innocent civilians and the timeline. Are you proposing that I should have allowed them to walk away?"
Cable made a noncommittal noise. "I see. Sounds grim. So you were willing to trade Randall and Malcolm's lives to stop them here," he surmised.
Bishop, mouth already open to answer, froze for a moment. "They had to be stopped," he finally said, roughly.
"Sounds like it," Cable agreed, and then gave Bishop a very direct look. "So why are you still running this program?"
"Because--" Bishop swallowed. "Because the price was too high," he admitted, the words burning him as he spoke them. But he could not have lied to Cable, or anyone, about this, and refusing to answer would have been just as--deceitful.
"Now we're getting somewhere," Cable said, much more quietly. He looked away, his face settling into a grim mask as he studied their surroundings again. "Maybe I'm wrong about factors not included in the program. But as it stands, you'll never change the ending, you know. You can't. You won't let yourself." He looked over at Bishop, his left eye blazing, the other shadowed. "If you did, do you honestly think it would haunt you any less?"
Bishop shook his head. "We knew we were here to stay," he said in a low voice. "We didn't have your--advantages. But we had a job to do--" He trailed off, taking a deep, somewhat unsteady breath. "Computer, reinitiate program and hold." The club shimmered and the first 'frame' of the program took shape around him. "Kindly save the psychoanalysis, as well," he said, his voice hardening. "Limit your observations to my tactics, or I will ensure you vacate the Danger Room." Had he just given Cable permission to critique his performance? Bishop blinked, shaking his head quizzically, and gave the other man a suspicious look.
Cable's eyes narrowed. "Tactics it is, then. You know very well how you could have prevented this," he said in an expressionless voice. "You just won't let yourself admit it." His gaze was intent, somehow angry. "You were relying on something more than yourself and your men," he said bluntly. "Some other factor you thought would work in your favor--was it fear?"
Bishop thought suddenly of his confrontation with Styglut, days afterward, and how stunned he'd been to realize the damage the fight had done, taking place in a world whose citizens were not--conditioned to take cover when they saw the X.S.E. among them.
"You said yourself that these were the hard cases," Cable went on mercilessly, striding over to him. "The worst of the worst. Did you really think they'd be afraid of you and your men? Hate and fear aren't the same thing, Bishop. One's a useful thing in an enemy. The other isn't."
"Enough," Bishop muttered. "I'm aware of that."
"No one is so blind as the man who chooses not to see," Cable snapped. "If you know that, why are you still messing with the variables on the firefight itself? Your tactics were less than stellar, but it was your strategy that was at fault here, Bishop."
Bishop set his jaw and stared Cable down. "The X.S.E. relied on fear," he said coldly. "They WERE afraid of us, Cable. They knew what their fate would be as soon as they saw us walk into the club that night." He stopped as Cable gave a harsh bark of laughter. "What?" he demanded. "I fail to see what's so amusing."
"Cornered rats, Bishop," Cable said sarcastically. "I don't doubt they were wetting themselves, but you pushed them to the point where their desperation was stronger than their fear." He tilted his head, regarding Bishop levelly. "Tell me I'm wrong."
Bishop told himself not to grind his teeth. "You're not wrong," he said tautly, grudgingly.
"Then stop running this flonqing program!"
"I will run this program as often as I see fit," Bishop snapped. "What I do in my leisure time is none of your concern." He shook his head. "Why are you interfering?" he demanded. "We're not teammates. You have no reason to be--"
"When I first came back to this time," Cable said sharply, "I didn't have a Danger Room to replay my failures. So I did it in here, and in here." He touched his temple, and then laid his hand over his heart for a moment. "I relived every battle I'd lost, every person I'd loved and seen die, over and over again. I did not have a single night's sleep uninterrupted by nightmares for years." His eye flashed dangerously. "It made self-delusion hard, that was the one benefit of it. The war was over, and there was nothing I could do about it except fight to prevent the situation from ever coming about in the first place."
"I don't have that option," Bishop said coldly.
"And if you did, Bishop? What then? If I fished my TDC off the ocean floor and offered to drop you right back outside that club that night, what would you do?" Bishop stared back at him silently, and Cable shook his head. "If you absolutely must pick at this particular old wound, that's the question you need to answer, Bishop. Not whether or not there was some tiny opening in the firefight that you didn't see."
"There's no point in that," Bishop said flatly.
"And there's even less in this," Cable said, that contemptuous edge creeping back into his voice. "If you're going to tear yourself to pieces, Bishop, at least do it over the real choices you made. Once you and your men walked into that club, you had one choice; fight or die. There's not much room to maneuver there."
Bishop met his eyes unwaveringly. "I would have held back," he said very quietly. "Is that what you wanted to hear? Perhaps I would have waited and tracked them, picking them off in smaller groups or individually. I certainly would not have waded in a crowd of civilians and begun shooting." The bitter tone had crept into his voice almost involuntarily, but he ignored it, and continued. "But what I chose to do then and what I might choose to do now are very different. I am very different, now." He smiled humorlessly. "Did you never make a mistake when you were new to this century? I would think your--culture shock would have been even more excessive than mine."
"Earth in the thirty-eighth century might as well be an alien planet, compared to the here and now," Cable said calmly. "And as for mistakes--you don't want to get me started. We'd be here until this time next week. But I don't tend to replay mine holographically, in excruciating detail, a few dozen times a week. It's not healthy."
"And you care, why?" Bishop asked, still striving for that somewhat wry tone.
"I don't," Cable said dryly. "Don't get ahead of yourself, Bishop. We are not having a male bonding moment, here--"
"I'm relieved to hear that."
"Good," Cable said. "I'm happy, you're happy, and as for this--" He gestured around at the dance club. "Just think about what I said." He started towards the door and then stopped, an odd smile on his face. "If you're that set on insoluble tactical problems, I should call up one of my own programs. An old battle of mine I lost in a moderately spectacular fashion--"
Bishop couldn't help the incredulous curse that slipped through his lips. "Do you have a problem with being consistent?" he asked in disbelief. "You can stand there and tell me this program is unhealthy, and yet offer me one of your own?"
"I'd only be inconsistent if I used it in the way you use this one," Cable said with a faint, flickering smile. "I don't. The only time I revisit my past in here is when I'm reminding myself why I'm in this century." The smile returned, even colder. "I run on hate, Bishop, and watching Canaanites annihilating cities full of innocent people is a good way to refuel."
"That sounds less healthy than this," Bishop pointed out a bit acerbically.
"I never pretended to be a paragon of psychological stability, Bishop," Cable said. "But there's a different between catharsis and self-torture."
"Sophistry."
Cable flung a hand over his heart, mock-staggering. "You've got me there. I'm cut right to the quick." Bishop growled wordlessly, and Cable shrugged, abandoning the pretense and striding over to the doors. He stopped in front of them, looking back over his shoulder. "I may have been a little too conclusive about your chances of altering the scenario from inside. You realize there may be a way to save them from within the firefight." Bishop raised an eyebrow, and Cable gave him another faint, disturbing smile. "The next time you run it, try standing in front of them."
He left without another word, and Bishop stared after him in silence for a long moment, thinking. *It all depends on what you're willing to trade to achieve your goal,* Cable's words echoed in his mind. After a moment of mulling that over, he shook his head slowly and holstered his weapon.
"Computer, end program," Bishop said quietly, and walked back out into the here and now.
fin