The SHIELD agents on the lawn were having what could only be described as a slightly enforced dance party.
Lucius had not merely made them move. He had choreographed them with a personal touch.
Two agents near the fountain snapped into a tight formation and started a sequence of mirrored arm sweeps that would have looked cute if they had not been wearing tactical jackets and expressions of private ruin. A third spun between them, dropped low into a sharp knee-slide across the trimmed grass, then came up pointing both hands to the sky as though the heavens had requested his suffering personally. Others cut in from the side with perfectly timed side-steps, shoulder pops, heel turns, and synchronised torso rolls that belonged on a glossy K-pop stage and nowhere within a hundred yards of federal authority.
Every SHIELD vehicle within range suddenly had the same song blaring from it, providing the much-needed music for the performance.
Snoop's voice, accompanied by the moves, was a masterpiece.
One man crossed his boots, pivoted, and threw out a finger-heart with dead-eyed despair. Another was forced into a series of bright, snappy hip flicks that made his holstered sidearm slap his thigh in time.
All the while, the lyrics were rolling. 'When the pimp's in the crib ma, drop it like it's hot'
The pair near the hedges executed a ripple through their shoulders and arms before one of them ended up twirling so hard he nearly lost his balance and only just recovered into the next beat, as dignity had already become optional.
The young mutants of the mansion started gathering almost at once.
They pressed against the windows first, then spilt out into the garden once it became obvious the show was not explosive in the conventional sense. Bobby Drake arrived with Kitty Pryde beside him, both of them staring at the lawn with the stunned delight of teenagers who had just discovered Snoopy could improve government agencies. Jubilee came running from the side corridor fast enough to nearly collide with Rogue, then squealed when she saw the agents throwing sharp formation changes in front of the fountain like a deeply unfortunate band on their first world tour.
"That is not real," Bobby said, then immediately grinned. "Actually, no, that's too coordinated. It's real."
Kitty half-phased through the stone balustrade so she could lean farther out without bothering with physics. "If this is an attack," she said, "I'm not against it."
Jubilee clapped once in delight when three of the agents dropped into matching crouches, sprang up together, and hit a sequence of chest pops with all the unwilling precision of men whose bodies had been unionised against them.
"Do they know they're doing that?"
"No," Rogue answered at once. Then, after another beat of watching one older agent spin, cross-step, and finish with a coy little shoulder glance he clearly had not approved in advance, she amended it. "Well. Not in the fun way."
More students gathered behind them.
Piotr Rasputin stood near the doors with his usual careful stillness, broad shoulders filling the entrance as he watched the performance with grave concentration, as though trying to decide whether this counted as a tactical threat or a social collapse. He was built like a church bell with opinions, and his mutation, once engaged, turned his skin into living organic steel.
At Piotr's side lingered Josh Foley, blond, wary, and already half-leaning forward with healer's instinct in his eyes. Elixir was the kind of talent Lucius found almost offensively valuable. Biokinetic healing, cellular correction, flesh persuaded back into obedience, the sort of gift that made doctors, warlords, and gods start thinking terrible, practical thoughts.
At the far end of the window line, Bobby muttered, "If they start singing, I'm leaving."
"They'd better sing," Jubilee shot back. "I want a full set."
Lucius's illusion, standing on the lawn in immaculate command of the whole involuntary production, inclined its head slightly as though acknowledging the audience's rising expectations.
-
The real Lucius was elsewhere.
Invisible and utterly unbothered, he moved like a private sin through the edges of the gathering students and the older X-Men, collecting what he had actually come for.
He had already decided that if Xavier's mansion insisted on presenting itself like an all-you-can-eat buffet of interesting mutations, then refusing to sample the menu would be rude.
He moved first past Bobby Drake. Cryokinesis, and more than that, if the talent were pushed correctly, meant ice shaping, temperature theft, and environmental control, all of it tied to a young man who still wore his power with more humour than discipline.
Kitty Pryde was next. Her phasing bypassed matter, ignored density, and turned walls into suggestions, which made it irritating to fight, beautifully useful in infiltration, and precisely the sort of talent any sensible bastard would want copied before the world got any brighter ideas.
Rogue stood a little apart from the others, which was sensible of her. Her gift was contact theft in its most intimate form, with life, power, memory, strength, and even fragments of self ripped away through skin contact and held in the body like an unwanted choir. Useful, yes, but also one of those talents that came pre-packaged with enough psychological damage to make handling it personally less attractive without a refined route.
Jubilee fairly glowed with restless delight. Her mutation generated plasma in bright bursts, pyrotechnic force shaped like fun until it wasn't. Not the grandest gift on the lawn, but stylish, adaptable, and useful in the hands of someone who didn't measure worth solely by apocalypse potential.
Piotr, meanwhile, had the sort of mutation any practical tyrant would keep in reserve for ugly days, with organic steel, mass, endurance, brute strength, and the pleasant simplicity of being able to walk through most conversations if one got bored with talking.
Josh Foley interested Lucius more than the rest. Biokinesis was an overpowered gift. Healing did not merely stitch wounds but corrected flesh, rerouted disease, and persuaded the body to stop failing and start behaving. That was not a student gift but a god's touch.
He examined Josh with extra care and moved on.
There were others too, lesser-known to the wider public but not to him now. A boy with minor sensory distortion. A girl with adaptive camouflage at the skin. Another with fragile but real empathic projection. Xavier's school always did overproduce the same thing in different flavours, injured children with frightening futures and a curriculum built to make them submissive enough for the newspapers.
-
Back in the office, Xavier had stopped pretending this was merely odd.
He reached out properly now.
His mind pressed into the agents' thoughts with a force that had once made governments nervous for the right reasons. Lucius felt the contact immediately. Xavier was trying to seize the pattern and free the men by undoing the imposed sequence, one mind at a time.
Lucius did not stop him outright.
That would have been childish.
Instead, he let Xavier in just far enough to touch the surface rhythm before sliding the actual control a layer deeper, where every dancer now held the pattern as if it were his own catastrophic decision. Charles found instructions, timing, physical compulsion, and shame, but he did not find a clean handhold large enough to rip the whole thing apart without tearing at the men themselves.
-
In the office, Fury had a phone pressed to his mouth and was whispering commands with concentrated fury.
"Stand down, break formation, fall back to transport. Team alpha, break contact. Break contact now."
Outside, the agents responded by arranging themselves into a sharp diagonal line and beginning a fast footwork section with syncopated arm throws so aggressively polished that Jubilee made a noise halfway between a laugh and a shriek.
One of the agents, a woman near the front who had spent the first minute in quiet despair, hit the rhythm perfectly; her own face changed mid-routine from horror to startled self-recognition.
Oh no, Lucius thought, that one has discovered aptitude.
That made it even better.
The finale arrived without warning.
The agents split into two lines, crossed through each other in opposite directions, spun, dropped, and rose into a layered formation around Lucius's illusion in the centre. Two at the back threw smooth body rolls into synchronised pelvic thrusts with all the doomed intensity of men physically unable to refuse. One slid forward on his knees, grabbed his own crotch in a move of such appalling Michael Jackson derivation that even Fury jerked in his chair. Another pivoted hard into an unnecessary little twerk that lasted just long enough to become unforgettable. The rest finished with finger-guns, hip snaps, and a final collective pose that looked like a dance crew had been cursed by a vindictive telepath with access to cable television.
The lawn fell silent for one perfect second.
Then the younger mutants burst into applause.
Jubilee was first, clapping hard enough to bounce on her heels. Bobby followed, openly laughing now. Kitty doubled over against the stone balustrade, one hand half sunk into it as she had forgotten where her molecules were supposed to end. Even Rogue, despite herself, had a hand over her mouth to keep the smile under control.
Piotr closed his eyes briefly; the Russian soul had not been built for this kind of collapse. Josh Foley looked between the agents and Charles with the moral uncertainty of a healer trying to decide whether humiliation counted as injury.
-
On the SHIELD side, the aftermath was mixed.
Two of the agents stood frozen in the wreckage of their own dignity, faces red, eyes fixed on the horizon with the rigid concentration of men already planning transfer requests. One looked actively ill. The woman who had discovered a talent for rhythm was still breathing a little too hard and refusing to meet anyone's eyes, though Lucius could feel the dangerous little flicker of enthusiasm she was trying not to acknowledge. Another agent, the one who had twerked, appeared to be reconsidering every career choice since adolescence.
'Tragic,' Lucius thought. She had a heart-shaped future in entertainment and had wasted it on SHIELD.
Lucius's illusion bowed slightly to the applause.
At the same moment, the real Lucius stepped back through the invisible seam between thought and presence and merged perfectly.
The ones who had visited him at the St. Regis did not share the students' appreciation except Kitty. Charles, Logan, Ororo, Jean, and Scott all knew exactly what sort of man had just turned a SHIELD perimeter into public choreography. That knowledge spoiled admiration without reducing the spectacle.
Logan's mouth had gone into that flat line which, on him, usually meant reluctant approval fighting with the desire to start a bar brawl.
"A prick," he muttered, softly enough. "Still, that was a hell of a flex."
Ororo kept her face composed, regal, unimpressed on the surface. Inside, however, a small and wholly private part of her had enjoyed the hip sequence more than she intended ever to admit aloud. Lucius, catching the edge of it in passing, stored the fact away with mean pleasure.
Scott looked personally offended that chaos could have this much timing.
Jean's reaction interested Lucius more. She was not smiling. She was calculating, and not the dance but the control behind it.
The number of minds, the fine motor guidance, the synchrony, and the split-layer manipulation were all enough to tell Jean the scale, even if she still did not know whether she herself could do the same. She simply did not comprehend her own limits.
Charles wanted it that way.
He could do this and far more without Cerebro. With Cerebro, he could have made whole towns dance themselves into submission if he ever let go of the moral theatre long enough to admit what sat in his own skull.
Fury, meanwhile, was turning angrier by the second.
Lucius could see it in the tightening jaw, the narrowed eye, the way fury in men like Fury always arrived looking less like emotion and more like a locked room inside the head where they started filing names under Necessary Future Problems.
-
Fury watched the bastard on the lawn start walking towards the house.
For one brief moment, something brightened in his mind.
Perhaps he and Xavier could still do something useful with this. Perhaps, if handled correctly, goaded properly, or tempted with the right mixture of ego and necessity, they might convince Noctis to join the Initiative instead of tormenting it from the outside.
The hope was ridiculous, yet still a possibility.