Charles Francis Xavier stood at the window of his office and looked down at the line of black cars rolling up the drive towards the mansion.
Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.
A polite name for a place that taught frightened children how to bow their heads to their aggressors and always be grateful for the arrangement. The building was beautiful in the old-money way, all stone, manicured grounds, and inherited reassurance. It looked like safety. It behaved more like an agreement. Stay quiet and presentable. Stay morally better than the people hunting you. Stay useful to the status quo, and perhaps the status quo would delay eating you.
Charles had spent years curating that compromise and calling it responsibility.
He knew what had happened elsewhere. He knew there were facilities, official or private, governmental or buried behind paperwork, where mutants were catalogued, sedated, cut open, studied, and disposed of when the result proved disappointing. He knew it now just as surely as he had known it before, and yet he kept choosing the high road as it let him keep the mansion standing and the newspapers calmer than they would otherwise be.
That was the problem with Charles Xavier. He could hear suffering, catalogue it, and still persuade himself that patience counted as virtue if the alternative risked the peace he preferred.
The lead car reached the front of the house.
By then, Charles had already skimmed the minds inside all of them.
The agents were easy. Tense, professional, half-bored, half-alert, each one carrying the usual SHIELD mixture of competence and secrecy that thought itself a substitute for ethics. The one mind that took effort did not take much effort at all in the end. Nick Fury had come personally to invite the X-Men to stand shoulder to shoulder against threats on a global scale.
That was the stated purpose.
The truth sat a little deeper.
Fury still used the old trick Charles had once joked about years ago, and the fact that he still relied on it said a great deal about both of them. Repeat something in your mind. Build a little layer of verbal noise. Give the telepath static instead of a clean road.
Fury, to his everlasting discredit, had chosen a song.
Charles could not help the small chuckle that escaped him as the director stepped out of the car below.
Some ridiculous milkshake song was looping in Fury's head with determined stupidity. Boys in the yard. Lessons for a price. The same few lines circling like a fly trapped in a bottle.
Really, the man needed help.
Charles turned from the window and guided the chair away from the desk as the knock came at the office door.
"Come in."
Jean opened the door and watched the man with a strange song in his head enter. Fury entered in a dark coat, with a hard face and a watchful eye. Two SHIELD agents remained outside in the corridor. Others spread across the entrance hall and grounds with enough discretion to look like an insult, trying to be polite.
Fury crossed the room and offered his hand.
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.
"Professor Xavier."
And they're like, "It's better than yours."
Charles took the hand anyway.
Damn right, it's better than yours.
"Director Fury. Welcome."
I can teach you, but I have to charge.
Fury sat when Charles gestured to the chair opposite. The room settled around the meeting at once. One old spymaster. One telepathic idealist. Two men who had spent too many years making compromises and calling the result necessary.
For a second, neither spoke.
La la, la la la. Warm it up.
Then Fury got to the point because he had never been patient with atmospheres he had not built himself.
"You know about New Mexico."
Charles folded his hands in his lap.
"I know enough."
"That would make you one of the very few." Fury leaned forward slightly. "Thor was not an isolated event. Neither was the machine he brought with him, nor the damage that followed."
Charles watched him without interrupting.
Fury continued.
"Alien threats are real. Larger threats are real. Mutants have already changed the scale of the world. Empowered people will always bring chaos with them."
That last word sat in the room with more honesty than most of the rest.
He was selling cooperation, but he was selling it the way a man sold insurance after setting a fire somewhere else in town.
"We need people who can respond," Fury said. "Mutant, enhanced, mutate whatever category the file wants to use this week. It doesn't matter. The old lines don't hold anymore."
Charles let the silence stretch just long enough to make Fury keep talking if he wanted the ground.
"I'm building a team," Fury said. "A real one. Something that can stand up when the next thing comes out of the sky."
"A team under SHIELD, I pressume" Charles interrupted.
Fury's mouth shifted a fraction.
"It would have to be, if it were to have any legitimacy."
Charles knew exactly what kind of control impulse sat underneath the pitch. Fury looked at every new danger and drew the same conclusion. More oversight. More structure. More reach. More leashes disguised as cooperation. The world terrified him, and terror in a man like Nick Fury always reappeared as administration.
Still, Charles had his own blind spots, and self-awareness never arrived cleanly for men who thought themselves responsible for other people's futures.
He inclined his head.
"The X-Men will always..."
The sentence broke apart when movement outside the office window pulled both men's attention sideways.
The SHIELD agents on the lawn had started dancing.
--
Lucius had been giving serious thought to Juggernaut.
Or rather, to avoid the power.
Cain Marko's power was a bad bargain wrapped in a useful result. The gift did not truly belong to the mutant body wearing it. It came from Cyttorak, from the Crimson Cosmos, from an entity so far up the multiversal food chain that Lucius's Veil of Fate would be about as protective as wet paper held over a bonfire. Replicating the power directly without preparation sounded like an excellent way to get noticed.
"No, thank you."
He sat in his lab with Bob open and floating before him, a cigarette drifting from the pack to his lips already lit. The first drag went in smoothly. The poison began its little work immediately. His regeneration began correcting it just as quickly.
Out of the Brotherhood's core members, Juggernaut and Multiple Man had already been dismissed for now.
Madrox remained refrigerated, Juggernaut remained untouched because Cyttorak could stay in his own crimson corner of reality until Lucius had something better than optimism between himself and multiversal attention.
That still left plenty.
He had already sacrificed twenty copies each from the rest.
Fire manipulation had become ridiculous in the best possible way. Calling it mere Pyro enhancement no longer did it justice. He could create flame, shape it, move it, starve it, feed it, spread it, and, if he felt artistic, likely turn most of a continent into a blazing fireplace before lunch. Zippo man would have been flattered if he had lived long enough to understand what superior hands had made of his little disability.
Lucius exhaled smoke and turned to Bob.
The page turned without a touch and settled on the current state of his accumulated hard work.
Name: Lucius Noctis
Race: Eternal
Class: Wizard
Affinity: Alchemy, Rituals
Innate Skills
- Rapid Healing
- Mental Shields
- Telepathy
- Teleportation
- Pyrokinesis
- Telekinesis
- Flight
- Force Field Generation
- Energy Blasts
- Molecular Manipulation
- Shapeshifting
- Lightning and Storm Manipulation
- Magnetic Manipulation
- Retractable Claws and Fangs
Racial Skills
- Immortality
- Genius-level Intellect
- Master Scientist / Engineer / Combatant
- Multilingualist
- Superhuman Strength / Durability / Speed / Agility / Stamina / Reflexes
- Regenerative Healing Factor
- Cosmic Energy Manipulation
- Construct Creation
- Illusion Manipulation
- Decoy Manipulation
- Presence Manipulation
- Sound Manipulation
- Matter Transmutation
Class Skills
- Veil of Fate
- Blessed Brewing
- Sacrificial Array
- Array of Convergence
It was lovely.
Bob, the twisted bastard that it was, still held the soul economy like a caveman accountant with a grudge against generosity. Lucius could buy powers through the system, certainly, but anything truly worthwhile came priced at a massacre scale.
The power of the walking refrigerator and a dozen other excellent options all sat behind a cost wall so high he would have needed slaughter on the combined level of the First and Second World Wars.
That sort of bloodbath, caused by him personally, would attract attention.
Not human attention, which he did not care much about. He had long since passed the point where that mattered. Universal or Multiversal attention. The gaze of things that read genocide like a flare signal and came to see what sort of upstart thought himself worthy of the noise.
Lucius was certain of one thing.
He was not ready and definitely did not want that.
Not yet.
Maybe after collecting a few Infinity Stones and upgrading his bargaining position, but certainly not before.
He destroyed the ash with molecular manipulation and leaned back.
"Better to see what the mind rapist is doing," he murmured.
This time, he would make it official.
He was a respected businessman after all.
He let his telepathy spill outward and turned it towards Westchester.
Xavier's mind rose into contact first, familiar, deep, carefully layered, still carrying that maddening blend of submissive sincerity and manipulation that always made Lucius want to slap the halo off him on principle. Around him sat the mansion, the delicious young mutants.
And there was Fury.
Lucius focused just long enough to catch the broad outline. Aliens, danger, unity, global threats, collapsing categories, and humanity's desperate need for defenders, all wrapped in the usual bureaucratic panic dressed up as heroic language.
Fury sold fear like policy and called the invoice duty
He smiled.
Then he reached sideways into the minds of the SHIELD agents waiting outside and gave them new priorities.
-
Back in the office, Charles had just started to talk.
"We the X-Men will always..."
Outside, agents moved onto the lawn and took their positions under the control of an unknown force.
An agent snapped into a spin, another agent threw both arms overhead, and the rest of Fury's perimeter detail began performing synchronised dance figures on the lawn like a heavily armed boy band suffering a collective breakdown with desperation in their eyes.
Charles stopped, and Fury turned.
And outside, the choreography continued with terrible commitment.