15 February 2008
SHIELD was kind enough to drop Lucius back in Queens in a black SUV with tinted windows, two silent agents in the front, another in the back and the sort of professional silence usually reserved for funerals and failed operations.
Lucius sat in the back seat with the collar gone, his hands free, and his mood stormy enough to qualify as a weather event.
No one tried to talk to him.
If one of them had attempted a final line about cooperation, he might have bitten through his own tongue just to have something warm to spit at them.
The vehicle slowed in front of his street.
One of the agents turned slightly.
"Mr Noctis, you are being released without charges."
Lucius looked at the back of the man's head and smiled with practised politeness.
"You say that like it is a gift."
The agent did not answer; the door unlocked.
Lucius stepped out, shut the door behind him, and watched the SUV pull away without hesitation.
Then he turned and saw his house.
For a moment, he simply stood there.
The front still looked respectable enough from the street if one ignored the broken trim, the patched window, and the way the door frame had been removed and rehung by people who considered craftsmanship an optional hobby. That illusion lasted until he stepped inside.
His lovely sitting room was wrecked.
Floorboards had been lifted, and several wall sections had been cut open. The sofa had been shifted, the shelves emptied and refilled in the wrong order, the rug rolled halfway back as if whoever handled it had lost interest in geometry halfway through. The rest looked worse. The bedroom floor exposed in places. Bathroom cabinet ripped out and bolted back with the grace of a prison riot.
Lucius inhaled slowly.
All he had wanted was a peaceful life while he sold potions, hunted the gifted, and improved himself through moderately questionable means.
This operation was something he expected from HYDRA, not SHIELD.
Yet here he was.
His house and his day were ruined. His beloved Tahoe was missing. And with all the power he had sto.. borrowed and stitched into himself, he had still gone down like a child the moment they came for him.
That part kept disturbing him the most. It made him restless in the worst possible way. So he did the only logical thing.
He turned invisible.
He no longer cared who was watching. Cameras, scopes, agents in parked cars, neighbours watching and reporting to God knows where. Let them watch empty air.
He stood in the middle of his broken sitting room, closed his eyes, and reached outward.
Telepathy moved through the street like fingertips across rough cloth. He felt minds nearby, some alert, some bored and some professionally attentive.
He found them all appetising.
Two in the car across the street. One in the house on the right. Another in a van half a block down, trying very hard not to think about coffee and doughnuts instead of why his supervisor had assigned him to a fruit wizard with a federal incident attached.
Lucius smiled faintly.
First, he needed to work on his telepathy properly. Not by frying guards every time curiosity beats technique.
He considered sitting on the armchair he favoured, then looked at the splintered wood and decided he preferred not to let his arse be pricked.
He stayed standing and started practising with patience he did not know he possessed.
He touched minds gently, then withdrew. He tested surface impressions and released them before they deepened. He learned the shape of thought before he pushed through it. Hunger felt different from suspicion. Routine from fear. Lust from professional annoyance.
The first agent he put down was naturally the slut who called him gay. He learned where to stop to not fry a brain with her. That counted as progress.
The second lasted longer and slumped over his steering wheel after Lucius pressed a little too hard. Still breathing and totally salvageable, unlike his house.
By the fourth attempt, he had discovered the line between pressure and damage well enough to make the skill a useful tool.
-
While Lucius was being a productive menace, the news was on fire. And the mutants were not being subtle about it. Every major network had the footage.
ABC interrupted scheduled programming. CBS went grave and careful. NBC framed it as a crisis of oversight. CNN used the words "illegal detention" so often that it began to sound like branding. Fox News put SHIELD graphics on screen like they had discovered Christmas came with a scandal bonus.
Television screens across the country were filled with the same clips.
Lucius in an orange inmate suit and a collar on his neck. An agent across the table with her face blurred. Words like blood sample, detention, consent and mutant experimentation landed with the force of a hammer every time they replayed.
One anchor on MSNBC adjusted her papers and looked straight into the camera.
"Tonight we are asking whether a shadow agency detained an American civilian without due process and subjected him to involuntary biological testing."
On another channel, a former federal prosecutor jabbed a finger at the screen.
"If this footage is authentic, somebody in SHIELD has crossed several lines that would normally trigger hearings, resignations, and lawsuits before breakfast."
A local New York affiliate sent a van to Queens.
The reporter stood outside Lucius's house with floodlights washing over the damaged façade.
"You can see behind me what neighbours describe as extensive structural damage," she said, careful but eager. "Windows were breached, the front interior appears heavily disturbed, and several residents tell us federal vehicles came and went through the night."
The screen turned to an older man Lucius had treated weeks earlier, suit tailored, skin healthier than it had any right to be.
"That young man helped people when hospitals were giving them waiting rooms and condolences," the man said firmly. "You can call him whatever you want on television. I call him the reason I can stand here."
Another cut.
A mother outside Elmhurst held her son's hand and tried not to cry while talking to the microphone.
"He gave my boy something nobody else could. He did not ask for anything. If SHIELD treated him like this, then maybe they should explain themselves for once instead of hiding behind acronyms."
The networks loved that one. Every channel replayed it.
Fury watched enough of the coverage from his office to begin hating the shape of Lucius's face.
And that was before the mutant reaction began. The protest had started within hours of the news. To say they were not peaceful would be an understatement of the century.
In Chicago, a young man with super strength peeled the doors off a federal vehicle like someone opening a tin of beans. Police tried to move the crowd until other mutants started to resist them with whatever abilities they had.
Detroit escalated faster. A pyrokinetic turned a line of riot shields into a wall of harmless but very dramatic flame that forced officers to retreat while the crowd cheered.
Boston had a different style of protest. Some mutants turned the asphalt outside a courthouse into something soft enough that police boots sank ankle deep while protesters walked across it normally.
Windows of federal buildings were smashed in Chicago, Detroit, and Boston.
By morning, some had turned ugly.
Windows of federal buildings were smashed. A registration office in Baltimore burned. A small Department of Justice annex in New Jersey had mutant slogans sprayed across its walls before the lower floor went up in flames. Crowds in several cities chanted about collars, camps, and experiments.
The Brotherhood of Mutants released a statement through pirate channels and every newsroom that would take it.
Magneto did not appear on screen himself, but the message carried his voice through its contempt.
The broadcast showed only a dark background and the emblem of the Brotherhood.
A male voice, cold and measured, spoke over it.
"The footage released today confirms what we have always known. Legal human institutions preach law while practising fear. They collar what they cannot command. They bleed what they cannot understand. They abduct those who refuse to kneel and call it security."
The voice paused.
"SHIELD has committed an act of aggression against Homo Superiors. The kidnapping of Lucius Noctis, the restraint placed on his body, and the experiments done on him will not be ignored. Let every one of our brethren hear this clearly. They will do this to any of us when convenience outweighs caution."
The next line arrived with more weight.
"SHIELD will feel the answer. We promise them not justice but memory. We promise them not diplomacy but consequence."
Every network replayed that one, too. Fury watched it with his jaw locked and his hands behind his back.
Hit after hit.
And the worst part had not even started yet.
-
By the end of the next day, Lucius had improved. Two days later, he was much better. Time moved quickly when the activity involved annoying SHIELD.
He was no master, but he no longer treated every human mind like a brick he needed to drive through a window. The worst outcome now was unconsciousness. Occasionally nosebleeds. Once, a mild seizure. That one had been an overcorrection on a SHIELD surveillance agent looking for any activity at his poor house.
Progress came from repetition, and repetition came from available test subjects.
SHIELD agents, Hydra assets who thought they were invisible, junkies too far gone to report anything coherently, and dealers whose absence would improve a postcode.
When his Telepathy was at an agreeable level, Lucius turned to experts.
He had already kidnapped four men with the kind of posture that screamed training. All lifted cleanly with teleportation, all dropped into the forests south of Alkali Lake like luggage.
He did not rush the process. He wanted their skills, not the spotlight. After multiple days, he had over sixteen experts' memories, training and habits.
The arrays absorbed them one by one. The chalk circle glowed faintly in moonlight. Snow kept trying to cover the symbols, and Lucius kept brushing it aside with telekinesis. He worked with patient efficiency.
Starting with weapons handling to room clearing on raids. Short, medium and long-range engagements. Explosives expertise. Ambush response. Knife work detailed enough to count as a philosophy.
He harvested all of it.
Each sacrifice left him steadier in a different way. Muscle memory without the years. Instinct stitched onto instinct. The body learns from dead men faster than training grounds ever could.
By the time the last one dissolved into silence, Lucius stood in the cold with a pistol in a holster, a rifle in hand and knew exactly how to break them down, clear, fire, and kill with them from distances he had not respected the day before.
He was proud of himself.
He considered returning home for a shower. Then he remembered the bathroom currently resembled an archaeological excavation sponsored by SHIELD.
He continued with his training, starting with Telekinesis. His most versatile tool, yet he could not even be considered an amateur. Days passed as the country turned in response to the righteous reaction of the mutants.
As February came to a close, he was able to levitate and move multiple objects at high speeds. Hellion's expert control of the molecular level, however, was far from his grasp.
Blinded by his vindictive rage and deep embarrassment, SHIELD had taught him that he was not aware of the happenings. He deemed himself ready to pay them a short visit. Not to SHIELD per se, but his good buddy Robert.
He arrived under invisibility, in a service corridor, tasted the minds nearby, and moved as if he belonged to the architecture. He found Robert on duty outside a restricted section, posture rigid, boredom sitting just beneath it.
He noticed the Mutant Power Dampeners, the large antenna-like emitters at many of the corners. Still, he was here to get Robert.
Lucius watched him for a full ten seconds, then he teleported directly behind him, clamped one hand over the man's throat, and folded space. The Triskelion vanished beneath their feet as the fresh air of the forest filled their lungs.
This was the start.