Invasion: Aftermath.

[N.P.C]

Major Nick Fury

Nick isn’t sure how long he’s been unconscious in his concealed niche. A day or two, judging from the state of his throat and his belly, and the number of trank darts embedded in his torso. Long enough that Frost probably isn’t actively scanning for him anymore. Probably safe to stay conscious.

The door doesn’t open – right, he’d jammed the lock mechanism during an earlier waking period. It takes him a few minutes to unjam it, then he steps out into a large open area, buttressed by temporary support columns, where Cerebro used to be. Guess Portal made it out, after all. He hopes the grenades he sent through didn’t do her any serious damage – taking out his own people isn’t usually part of his battle plan.

OK. Get out of here, get to base – no. I show my face there, Frost gets a call, I’m back to playing Pinochio. Actually, Nick thinks he might be able to resist her influence now that he knows it’s coming, but “might” is too week a reed to depend on. OK. Get out of here, get one of those psionic inhibitors. Figure the rest out after that.

A few more locked doors, and he’s out in the courtyard, staying to the shadows.

[Warren Worthington III]

The hot breath on the back of Warren’s neck wakes him up, at least partially, just before a rough tongue goes to work on his ear. "Mm? Someone’s feeling frisky this morn – oh." He grins ruefully and gives the pup a friendly scratch behind the ears, then listens for Josh, who’s nowhere in range… probably already on his way to the Baxter Building.

"Right. Morning, pup! Guess ‘Mom’’s already at work, huh?" He’d promised Josh he’d stop teasing him about the “Mom” thing, but it is pretty funny.

The puppy whines insistently, and Warren doesn’t need to be a telepath to understand why he’s being woken up. "Yeah, OK, OK. Working on it." He tosses away the covers and slips his feet over the edge of the bed, stretches a little, looks himself over. The bruises from the craziness in Paris have pretty much healed, as have the cuts from diving through the window at the movies, and the soreness he’s still feeling isn’t really something he gets to complain about… so, OK.New day.

It’s Sunday, after all. Maybe psychotic killers take Sundays off? A day without somebody trying to kill me would be like a week in Maui at this point. The deal was supposed to be that he’d officially join the XMen for PR purposes; how did he end up doing all this fighting?

He looks around for his pants, which are nowhere in sight; frowns at the pup and asks sternly "Did you eat Daddy’s pants?" Oh, Lord, now Josh’s got me doing it. I’ll never live that one down.

"We couldn’t have rescued a parrot from the path of a speeding airplane or something? At least parrots don’t have to be walked every few hours…" He can’t help but grin at the woeful look he gets in response, though, or at the eager tail-wagging that follows his grin. "Yeah, you know how to play to your audience, I’ll grant you that. I should take lessons… if I could master those puppy-dog eyes of yours I’d have every talk-show host in the country eating out of my palm."

The puppy’s whining has become more insistent, and Warren considers foregoing the pants, but he’s already gotten enough lectures about that this year, so he keeps looking Pants, pants, pants… here, pants! Yoo-hoo! Hrumph. Well, OK, let’s go at this logically. We were there… then we were there… then he did that… which would have sent them flying that way, and – ah. Warren looks behind his bureau and fishes his pants out with a wingtip from where they’d fallen, slides them on, carefully zips them up.

"OK, we’re on, pup!" He snatches up the puppy with a wingtip and a bit of TK, thankful he’s still small enough to carry that way, and opens the window… then shivers. It got cold out there! But a bit of concentration on his TK-aura and he’s enfolded in a two-inch-thick layer of perfectly still air, and they’re on their way.

[N.P.C]

Major Nick Fury

The courtyard is fairly empty, which is a relief… stealth and infiltration are among Nick’s strengths, but in a place like the Institute there’s no telling who might spot him how, and the last thing he wants to do is get into another fight. So he moves slowly and carefully, waiting until the kids in the courtyard go inside before making a break for the woods.

Meanwhile, part of his mind is cataloging the damage… broken windows, damaged walls, the crater in the ground where the ops van would have been. He wonders how many of his soldiers got out when he called the abort, wonders how many survived. Judging from the amount of debris, he suspects the casualty count was high.

Nick has been a professional soldier most of his life. He’s seen a lot of death, caused a lot of it. He’s never gotten used to it, but he’s learned to deal with it. One thing he’s learned is to remember why it happened, and who’s accountable. In this case they “why” is completely unjustifiable, and that makes it much worse. Frost has a lot to answer for.

He makes it to the woods’ edge unspotted, and breathes a sigh of relief… from here, it should be easier to get to the highway. So of course, that’s when he hears the sound from behind him. Damn. Always when you least expect it.

He’s already sliding behind a tree for cover and pulling out his sidearm before he’s entirely aware of the noise, and peeks out quickly to see his pursuer, hoping it’s someone he can talk to rather than shoot… the last thing he needs is to face that psychotic Canadian, for example.

[Warren Worthington III]

From the air, the damage left by the attack on the Institute is, if anything, more visible than from the ground… broken windows, damaged walls, the crater in the ground near the boy’s dormitory, the fire-blackened patches and fallen trees.

Which reminds Warren he should catch up on his time-lapse film project, especially now that repairs are going on… seeing high-speed images of the Institute “repairing itself” would be dramatic, once this is all over. He wishes he’d started before yesterday’s cleanup, though of course there had been a million more important things to do… and even with all the shattered glass and wreckage and spent cartridges cleaned up, it still looks like a war zone. And that’s not even counting the damage to the foundation from whatever had taken Cerebro.

All of which seems terribly unimportant compared to whatever damage might be caused by whoever took Cerebro. Warren’s read the files on the Stryker invasion, and how Xavier’d almost used that machine to kill practically every sentient being on Earth; the idea that it might be in someone else’s hands now, someone like Rasputin, is profoundly frightening. He tries to console himself, remembering that only a really powerful all-round telepath can use Cerebro to its full potential… even Jake can’t really use it in full gear… and how many Xavier-level telepaths can there be? Only takes one, he answers himself, and they wouldn’t have gone through this much effort to take the thing if they didn’t think they could use it.

He shakes his head to clear it, concentrating on the here and now. Whatever’s happening with Cerebro, and whoever attacked us yesterday, today is a new day… and at least we’re not being attacked now, right?

So of course, that’s when he sees the armed figure creeping stealthily through the woods. Damn. Always when you least expect it.

His first instinct is to glide in behind whoever it is and smash them against a tree with a wingstrike… then he remembers the puppy being cheerfully carried on one of those wings. Josh would never forgive me if the pup got hurt in a firefight… heck, I’d never forgive myself. So he drops down to the ground and releases the pup before approaching his target… then winces at the anxious yapping behind him, as the figure dives behind a tree for cover. Oh, hell… so much for stealth. Well, let’s see how far I can get with diplomacy.

"Let me try to make this simple for you, whoever-you-are. I don’t know what you’re doing here and I don’t know what you want.

“What I do know is that in the last two days your buddies have drugged me, shot at me, sent half the French police force after me, fired a goddamned surface-to-air missile at me, blown up my home, and hurt my friends – not to mention screwed up what was well on its way to being the best date in recorded history. And I’m still here, and unless you’re a lot tougher than you look, you aren’t going to take me down, and to be honest I’m really sick of fighting soldiers.

“So, seriously… can we just stop this? Drop your weapons and kick them over here and I give you my word you won’t be hurt."

[N.P.C]

Major Nick Fury

> Drop your weapons and kick them over here and I give you my word you won’t be hurt.

“Works for me, kid.” OK, then… plan B. The Institute has a resident psychic or two… maybe they’re my best bet for cutting Frost’s puppet strings. We do have a common enemy, after all. Just hope I can convince them of that. He kicks both sidearms over to near the winged kid and steps out from behind the tree, careful to keep his hands in plain sight.

“Fury, Nicholas J. Major, United States Army. Serial number 672-45442. There, that takes care of the formalities. Now, take me to see your commander, pronto.” The winged kid doesn’t seem quite as cowed by Nick’s command-voice as he’d hoped, but it turns out not to matter… he seems willing enough to take Nick in.

A few minutes later they’re knocking on a door labeled “Jake Shepard, Headmaster.” The name is familiar to Nick from briefings… this is their new hotshot telepath. Makes sense, if the roles were reversed he’d want the prisoner mind-scanned, himself.

[Jake Sheppard]

-/// Flashback, or “So, what the hell use is Jake anyway?” ///-

When it comes to chronicling the Great Strikeback Invasion – or, more pressingly, to facing the irate parents of those caught up in it – this is not going to be Jake’s proudest moment. Because while everyone else (staff and pupils) is having their little heroic epiphanies he’s… asleep, his real secret power, next to procrastination and an ungodly knowledge of all things geekish, seemingly the ability to snooze merrily through that which would awaken the dead. Which is how he misses the phone going off to alert him to the Paris situation, and remains oblivious to the gunfire and explosions as it hits a little closer to home.

In the end it’s the screaming that wakes him. Not the *real* screaming, of course, but the mental buzz going off around the Institute. He hasn’t yet trained himself, the way he’s told Xavier and Jean used to, to keep a mental eye on the Mansion at all times, but the level of general panic eventually cuts in, interrupting a perfectly good dream - Okay, that doesn’t belong here… – and he bolts awake with something like ‘Bzuh-whuh?’ to find that things don’t make much more sense, really. Because here, in his room, it’s still dark and quiet – Xavier must’ve put in some kind of sound proofing or something, which given the nature of the Institute’s inhabitants strikes Jake as a bloody brilliant idea, though he reckons the Professor’s motivation for creating such a zen-like little bubble probably had far more to do with psychic advancement than taking extended duvet days.

It’s after that that things get really weird. Not just the usual sort of *weird* things tend to get when one is psychic, or even the sort of weird you half expect running a school where student selection is, of course, based on exactly how, erm, weird the individual in question is. The invasion itself ought to be headspinning enough – sure, he was briefed on Stryker’s attempts and all, but lightening isn’t meant to strike twice, and this, which mutant soldiers and helicopters and just total bloody insanity, is just whacked – but the really odd thing, Jake notices, reaching out mentally to try and place soldiers before making a dash for the elevator and Cerebro (damned if he knows what the bloody thing actually really does, even now after all the briefings and trainings and stuff, but he should be able to get it to do something useful, at least, else what’s the point of it?) is something akin to going into an empty room and feeling eyes boring into your back. Someone’s been here before…

... yes, this is weird. Going deeper, it’s clear that the more important members of the team aren’t quite in their own minds… or rather, someone else is sharing headspace. It’s a pretty neat job, as these things go (Jake has to admit a twisted admiration, given how hackneyed his attempts had been… though no, we don’t endorse this any more, do we? It’s a bad use of telepathy. Yes), intricate strings leading back to… what, exactly?

So, this is the Institute’s new pet psychic? How… pathetic. You’re out of your depth, Sheppard

-/// End Invasion Flashback ///-

Psychic battles are generally held to be fairly exciting things. So it’s a bit of a let down that Jake can’t remember much of his first beyond that he didn’t win, and got left with something that started out as an insane drilling pain in his skull, complete with schlock-horror *help, my brain is melting!* nosebleed and all (yes, very dignified, sigh…), and dulled to something akin to the world’s worst hangover. On the plus side, he’s not dead, so that’s something. Not a very big something, next to losing Cerebro… and it doesn’t really inspire much tendency to give leeway in the parents (yes, he’s still stinging from meeting Mrs. Collins – if he didn’t know better, he’d say Laurie’s shyness was down to being crushed because bloody hell, the woman is a firebrand and a half)… but he’s not dead.

He finds himself wishing (for probably the first time since the post-Invasion staff meeting – silver lining to those Storm clouds or what?) he was, though – or, at least, that he wasn’t the headmaster and therefore the one expected to deal with things like this – because he’s not pretending he has a clue what’s going on, or how to handle this, or anything. That’s all Ororo’s division. But with her running the Fantastic Fact-Finding Mission it falls to him…

… and maybe it’s not so bleak after all, because if he can get some answers then maybe it’ll go some way to proving that he’s not totally useless. Or at the very least make him feel less like a waste of space…

Jake takes a moment or two to order his desk, a more formal version of the pre-meeting ritual he’s been following with the students – actual paperwork, this time, in solemn black folders as opposed to his usual either brightly coloured ringbinders or graffiti’d cardboard files, plans for the Institute rebuild spread across one part of the desktop as if to make the point that yes, your people buggered us up good and proper and a double-check that all the dolls action figures are out of sight – before sending the mental nod to both Warren and his prisoner / companion / whatever that they can < Come in >

[Warren Worthington III]

Warren’s a bit distracted as Fury summarizes the events of Strikeback for Sheppard’s benefit… for one thing, he’s still dressed in nothing but a pair of jeans; for another, the pup is still out in the woods. Not that there’s anything too dangerous out there, and Warren can find him again later pretty easily – enhanced hearing has its advantages – but it’s still distracting.

Even so, their mutual debriefing makes several things clear: first, that their immediate enemy is actually Emma Frost (I guess Josh was right about her… I owe him an apology); second, that the government really has been assembling units intended to “deal with the mutant threat”; third, that this U.S. Army Major really is asking the X-Men for help in dealing with his own unit. (It still leaves unanswered why the team in Paris attacked them, and why Strikeback invaded before they were ready, but Warren suspects he’ll probably never know why.)

"One thing I don’t understand, Major. If what you say is true, then you and your people considered us – mutants, I mean – to be the enemy long before Emma Frost subverted you. Why come to us for help now? "

Warren can tell the question sparks a wave of anger, which their visitor gets under control before responding. “Kid, in my line of work everybody’s the enemy ‘till they prove otherwise. Mutant, baseline human, cute little puppy dog, don’t matter. An’ threat capacity’s based on whatcha can do, not whatcher gonna do, ya follow? Ya got an army, ya got nuclear capacity, ya got weather control, army’s gonna have a plan in place ‘case ya come after us.” He shrugs. “Tactical situation’s changed now; enemy’s got the upper hand. So I need allies. This debacle proves y’fight mutants with mutants, an I figure you people’re saner’n the other teams – can’t imagine Magneto’s people invitin’ me in for tea, f’rexample – so yer my first choice. That’s why I’m askin’ for help.”

Fury pauses for a moment, then gets up from his seat and adds “If you got a problem with that, truth is I don’t give a damn. Other hand, ‘f you’re callin’ me a bigot, that’s personal, an’ I’d be inclined to kick yer teeth in for it ‘fit didn’t look like somebody beat me to it. That clear?”

Warren nods, somewhat cowed – he can understand why people follow this man. "Perfectly, major. So… what kind of help are you looking for?"

Fury frowns at that, hostility forgotten, and sits back down to face Jake. “Well, for starters, I need somebody t’cut Frost’s puppet strings. You up to that, Doc?”