Cooldown

Posted on Wed Apr 9th, 2025 @ 9:38pm by Charles Xavier & Scott Summers & Connor Bruin & Bobby Drake & Hank McCoy & Kurt Wagner & Hayden Davis & Jean Grey & Kennedy Kelly & Maeve MacKenna & Jennifer Bryant & Drew Williams & Desmond Greene & Kayleigh Marshall

0 words; about a 1 minute read

Mission: Episode 6: X-Fernus Agenda
Location: Blackbird | Indian Ocean
Timeline: December 10th, 1990

The Blackbird cut through the upper stratosphere like a needle through silk, the storm of fire and fury left far behind, visible only as a shrinking halo on the horizon. Despite the roaring engines and the hum of the pressurized cabin, sound felt muffled by the silence that had taken hold of the team. Not one among them moved or spoke for several long minutes. Even breathing seemed an effort after what they had just witnessed.

Scott held Jean close as he moved through the central cabin, her weight cradled carefully in his arms like she might vanish if not held tight enough. He stepped past silent faces—some turned away in grief, others glassy-eyed and blank from shock—and brought her to the med bay in the rear compartment, where Kayleigh lay slumped beside Drew's unconscious body.

"She tried to heal him," Bobby whispered. "It was too much and she just... gave out."

Scott carefully eased Jean onto the med-bed next to them. It was getting crowded back there. Jean stirred but did not speak. Her eyes fluttered briefly before she slipped into a deep sleep.

Only then did Professor Xavier's voice fill the cabin again, this time through the ship’s internal speakers—gentle, but edged with solemnity.

"X-Men... you've done well inasmuch as I am glad to see everyone made it into the Blackbird. I regret that Cerebro scans confirm there is no remaining life on Genosha... not even Limbo's horrors remain. Yet despite such loss, your actions have saved thousands. Evacuations were successful. International relief efforts have already begun to render aid for the survivors you helped get offshore. What you accomplished today is more than Magneto and his Brotherhood ever could. You gave hope where there was only despair. You saved lives, not sacrificed them."

The Professor's voice faltered only slightly before continuing.

"Now I require a post-mission account. Are there any casualties or anomalies unaccounted for by Cerebro? Any knowledge of enemy operatives, possible survivors, or lingering threats?"

Connor raised one hand, fingers signing rapidly. His brows furrowed when his speech-generating device stuttered with static.

"C-CO-... VECTOR... U-NK-N... SIG," it garbled, then cut off with a flicker of its LED display. With a frustrated breath, Connor adjusted the strap of his haptic gloves and held up one finger to the team, asking silently for a moment's grace. The device had taken a beating over the past week. It was a testament to the design that it still worked at all.

But where Connor's field maintenance of his speech-generating device required his silence, it opened the floor for the rest of the team to give their thoughts to the Professor's requested debriefing.

Hayden tried to tell her part of the story from her perspective and keep it as succinct at possible. She began at her capture and imprisonment. Then the fight for freedom and meeting Victor Creed, John Proudstar, and Alex Summers. She mentioned the forest and cave and then being in that Machine. The terror and torment had been excruciating even for a few moments. She paused as her mind lingered longer than she'd wanted on that pain. Then all hell broke loose. Literally. "I'm sorry Professor. It's all still a jumble in my head. There was so much of... everything. It's gonna take a few days for me to sort and deal with it. Demons, Professor, demons...." She trailed off, shaking her head.

“We aren’t going to talk about that?!” Pietro asked as he gestured towards the med bay, specifically to the one where Jean slept. “I've known you guys for a long time now, and I have been on the receiving end of enough attacks that I know what anyone in the First Class is capable of… that was like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Quicksilver felt the eyes of the team turn towards him as he spoke. “Don’t get me wrong, Jean is a very nice lady and I wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t given me a chance but that… bird thing… that was pure anger and rage, it was going to nuke the planet. How are you not all freaked out by that?”

A silence fell over the cabin. The hum of the Blackbird's engines underscored the weight of Pietro’s words, the way only silence after chaos can. At last, Professor Xavier spoke, his voice calm but firm.

"You are right to be concerned, Pietro," he said. "It was... unlike anything many of you have ever witnessed. But it is not the first time."

His solemn face warped with a blip in the feed while he spoke through the monitor.

"From my research, I can tell you the Phoenix Force is a cosmic entity of nearly unfathomable power. It is a force of creation... and of destruction. Jean is—through an event from her past—bonded to it. This has been the subject of my research for some time. I had hoped..." he trailed off, his voice dipping for a beat.

"Now there are other threads that concern me just as deeply," the Professor went on, steepling his fingers. "Through Jean's mind, I glimpsed a shadow, another man whose dark legacy I've been pursuing. Nathaniel Essex. His fingerprints have been turning up in the most unlikely of places."

Bobby cut in. "Prof, what does he have to do with what just happened?"

"According to what's been gathered," Xavier replied, "Essex mentored David Moreau. It's now likely that Essex coaxed Aurora away from Muir Island under some pretense of protection or power. How she ended up in Limbo—and how time advanced so drastically for her—we still do not know. I saw through Jean's mind how Essex had total control over Aurora and the now mutated Moreau, using them to provoke Jean into a heightened state of fear before the Phoenix Force drove me from her mind. But that's not even the most concerning part..."

He paused, the weight of the thought heavy in the air.

"I believe Essex orchestrated this entire chain of events. That he engineered Moreau's corruption. That he led Aurora—our Aurora—into the clutches of Limbo's corruption. And that he placed them both on a collision course... planning all the while for Jean to be the fulcrum.”

The Blackbird was quiet again. No longer an atmosphere of fear anymore. It became one of dread.

"The Phoenix event may not have been a side effect," Xavier said. "I suspect it may have been the goal." With that being said, he came full circle. "If that is so, then we are playing chess against a master manipulator, and it is for that reason I am asking everyone to think carefully and provide every detail of the past week. There is no telling what may be crucial later on."

“What about Alex?” Kennedy chimed in as they discussed the events of Genosha, the found and now missing First Class member was a big deal. “He was on that island this whole time? I get that there was equipment blocking Cerebro but he was just running a rebellion with Victor Creed…” She shook her head as she tried to recall everything that had happened in the week they were on Genosha. “We stormed the Machine because it was the heart of Moreau’s operation, but when it became a desperate situation they both disappeared.”

Kennedy tapped her fingers on the arm of her chair as she thought about it more. Only Proudstar had returned to help and he had died. Victor and Alex were both powerful and effective mutants making their absence all the more suspicious. “There was talk of a spy in the rebel forces, someone who was feeding Moreau information and if what the Professor says is true, that means they were ultimately working for Sinister. But which one? Alex or Victor?”

Lowering his head in shame, Kurt said, "I never saw Victor get up... after... he vas struck down..."

While collared by Moreau, a vicious Kurt had nearly cut Victor to pieces before the team managed to free him. It was a toss-up as to how long the old war veteran would take to recover from that, but his reputation was that he had survived worse. The fact that neither Alex nor Victor had ever resurfaced either during Magneto's short-lived coup d'état or during the following Limbo invasion did not bode well either way.

Connor tapped the side of his device and a low hum signaled its reactivation. "I DO NOT THINK VICTOR WAS THE DOUBLE AGENT." His hand movements were slow and almost reverent as he lifted a tiny component between his fingers and raised it for the others to see.

"THIS IS WHY MY TRANSLATOR FAILED," the digitized voice rang out from his chest-mounted speaker. "IT WAS PLACED BETWEEN THE MOTHERBOARD AND THE OUTPUT AMPLIFIER."

Hank twisted around from the pilot's seat, his brow furrowed. "May I?" he asked.

Connor nodded, placing the component carefully into his furry palm. Hank examined it with a jeweler's scrutiny, then turned it toward the low light of the cabin.

"Fascinating..." he murmured. "At first glance, this appears to be some form of micro transponder—possibly one that piggybacks off your device's own power source. Ingeniously hidden. I'll need my lab to confirm, but I've never seen one this compact before."

"HOW IT GOT THERE," Connor continued, "IS THE MOST TROUBLING PART."

He glanced to the rear med bay, where Kayleigh and Drew lay unconscious and recovering. The jet vibrated softly beneath them, the engines murmuring like distant thunder.

"WHEN WE WERE IMPRISONED IN THE FLESH FACTORY," Connor explained, "MY DEVICE AND GLOVES WERE TAKEN. I DIDN'T HAVE THEM UNTIL ALEX BROUGHT THEM TO ME."

He let that hang a moment, watching as realization began to dawn.

"HE WAS DRESSED IN A MAGISTRATE UNIFORM," Connor went on. "HE SAID HE WAS DEEP COVER FOR THE RESISTANCE AND THAT HE CHANGED HIS OBJECTIVE TO BREAK US OUT. WE TOOK HIM AT HIS WORD."

Shaking his head darkly, Connor kept signing. "WE ESCAPED VIRTUALLY WITHOUT INCIDENT. ALEX BLEW A HOLE THROUGH THE CEILING AND THEN WALKED RIGHT ONTO THE TRAIN THAT BROUGHT US THERE."

Looking around in shame for being the tool that was used to blow their cover, Connor concluded flatly while avoiding their eyes, "MOREAU KNEW OUR EVERY MOVE, JUST AS HE HAD BOASTED, AND IT WAS BECAUSE I CARRIED A TRACKER IN MY DEVICE. THE PERSON WHO ENSURED THAT I RETAINED IT WAS ALEX."

Jennifer didn't have anything to add, really. She had not seen anything none of the others had mentioned already. No one had said anything that she disagreed with and she couldn't think of anything that hadn't already been said. She didn't talk. She didn't talk just to talk. So she looked silently out the window and listened to the others. The loss of life was overwhelming and she couldn't stop worrying about Drew. She wasn't sure of his condition. A single tear rolled down her cheek. It had been a rough mission. Unlike the last one, however, it only strengthened her resolve.

Desmond, for his part, was conked out in his seat. His tall and bulky frame meant he had barely fit in a single chair when he was awake. Now that he was slumped down he hung across two seats. His snoring was almost subsonic, rumbling at a similar frequency as the Blackbird's engine roar.

Hayden listened as Connor finished his explanation, still struggling to believe that anyone connected to Scott could be capable of such actions. "Look, no matter who it was, this isn’t on you," she said. "They put us at a disadvantage from the start. It's like the Professor said, this Essex guy is a master manipulator. You're a good leader, Connor. Don't let him get in your head."

Connor's gaze had been fixed on the transponder in his palm, jaw set in that familiar way of his, but at Hayden's words, his eyes flicked up. The edges of his mouth lifted—not quite a smile, but close, a softness overtaking the heavy weight he carried. He signed quickly.

"UNKNOWN VARIABLES ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO PREDICT. BUT I WILL BE READY NEXT TIME." Then he added manually, tapping a slow rhythm over his heart before pointing to Hayden. "THANK YOU."

Professor Xavier's own smile crept in at the edges of his mouth. "Anyone who tries to probe your mind uninvited, Caveman, will come out feeling like they've lost a chess match… blindfolded… underwater." The humor was gentle but a grounding and deliberate levity after so much darkness.

“I knew something was off when he didn’t ask about his brother or his girlfriend.” Kennedy huffed in irritation, “If you hadn’t seen the people you cared about in MONTHS and people arrived that could tell you something… anything… you would take them up on it, wouldn’t you?” She shook her head in disapproval of her revelation, “Because he didn't care about them. Whatever Alex was scheming it wasn’t to reunite with his family or the First Class. I bet he was actually panicking about seeing X-Men on Genosha, we could have ruined everything if we had caught on.” Kennedy paused for a moment before she asked the harder question. “Do you think he’s dead? We never found the relic either. What if that’s what Alex actually wanted and we were just a means to an end? The rebellion was just some sick cover, fake justice, so he could get to that relic.”

"I don't know what to believe," Scott cut in. "If Sinister..." He refused to use the man's given name, as he had turned inhuman. "... was influencing both Aurora and Moreau, and I can confirm outside the Professor's own observations that he was..." His own memory flipped back to the footage from Muir when Aurora left with Sinister seemingly of her own volition, as well as Jean's flashbacks she'd shared with him of Moreau taking invasive samples from her in a lab under Sinister's direction. "... then why would Alex steal something that Sinister's own agents were vying over? That doesn't make any sense."

"Survival of the fittest may explain the harsh eventualities of evolution," Hank offered in his musing tone of voice, "but when applied socially, it has proven more than an apt excuse to justify otherwise unimaginable cruelty. 'The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,' as Thucydides said in defense of the Athenian domination of Melos in the Peloponnesian War."

Bobby furrowed his brow. "So this Sinister dude set up all this shit to go down just so his puppets can jockey for position?"

"That may be reductive but no less untrue for it," Hank said. "Although I would wager a man of science would adorn his motives with more grandiose claims to justify the means by the ends." His face darkened for a moment. While his personal history was more about experimenting on himself rather than others, he still had veered over the line in the past. "I know whereof I speak."

Kurt, who had been quiet until now, his golden eyes watching each of them with that familiar mix of concern and compassion, finally spoke up. He leaned forward slightly from his perch near the rear bulkhead, arms loosely folded, voice calm but full of warmth.

"I cannot lie and say zhis past veek vas not horrible. Now zhat ve haf passed zhrough ze fire, let us give zhanks for zhat." His voice raised a little, his passion emboldening him beyond his weary exhaustion. "No, ve cannot know every heart, and not every question vill find an answer. But even if yesterday vas lost to shadow, today still dawns in ze light." He shrugged, almost bashfully, once people started listening to him. "I just zhink... if we are given a new dawn, it is not for regret, but for renewal. Let us not vaste it asking vhat ve should hef done but by rising again and choosing to valk forward in hope."

There was a beat of silence, no one else speaking up with new intel. The debrief, for now, had reached its natural close.

"If there's nothing else," the Professor said, "I will make ready the mansion to receive the wounded. You've all endured a harrowing experience, and you have my deepest pride and admiration."

His tone softened further. "Make use of the therapeutic wellness suites in the first subbasement, all of which are are at your disposal. Rest. Reflect. And when you're ready… we move forward."

Scott gave a silent nod, still seated near the medbay where Jean rested peacefully. He looked like he might never leave her side.

Connor met Scott's eye and nodded before he assessed the rest of the cabin, taking in the state of his team. Bruised. Burnt out. But alive. And in that, there was victory.

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