Formerly chapters 1 and 2: Darkness in my eyes and Chaotic Friday.
Chapter 1 - Life at GNC
"You're sure it's safe?" asked John, one of my friends and teammates. The "nope" he received wasn't most likely the thing he wanted to hear, but at least it was true. We were preparing to jump from a plane on the roof of a heavily guarded building in the cover of the night. Sounds easy, right?
How did we get into this situation in the first place? As I already mentioned, we sometimes get called for missions by the UN. This was one to capture an underground boss who was supposedly planning to blow up the next peace conference and threatened some leaders.
Location: Singapore; Plan: Find, catch and put in jail. Simple? He just had to hide in a giant skyscraper with guards and a massive concrete wall all around.
We landed on the roof as quiet as possible and proceeded in groups. Group one, led by me, through vents and group two, led by John, took the stairs. Just like on every mission of ours, each team member has a camera attached to the suit. The footage would make great action movies. Ok, so first thing was to take out the security cameras, and let group two in. A couple of swift movements of legs later the guards in the security room were out and we were in the system. Cameras off, doors open, system overridden and off we go to meet the rest of the team. Knocking out more guards on the way we finally made it to the room our dear "friend" was occupying. We didn't bother to knock on the door and entered the room. It surprised me a little that he was there alone, but it made our job a lot easier. Not that he was happy to see us.
After leaving the building and handing our captive over to the right people we headed back home. We took off and I said: "Great job guys, you have the day off tomorrow. Don't you dare to come to work, understood?" Of course they did. We landed in our HQ and after the short debriefing headed each to our own home to get some sleep.
I didn't get much sleep that night, I just couldn't. There are those times my past comes back to haunt me and there are also times the future does the same thing, but sometimes they are just nightmares. This time they kept me up all night. At 5AM I gave up the battle to get fall asleep, got dressed and headed to my office underneath my apartment. Normal working hours here are from 9AM to 4PM which made the building empty and quite. It was Monday, the paperwork day. Let me explain. For all the paperwork that collects itself during the week – contracts, bills, invoices, charts, diagrams and other boring stuff I have to look at and sign- is what I do on Mondays. Because now "I hate Mondays" gets a really deep meaning that way. By the time I finished, it was already 10AM.
Leaving the office, I greeted my secretary Katie: "Hi, Katie! How was the weekend?" "Fine, I suppose. We went to visit my parents and nothing bad happened so fine. Yours?" "We had a mission in Singapore but otherwise boring."
"That explains the absence of the boys at work today." We laughed. Here at GNC we are all friends. It's great having boys and girls, humans and mutants working and living together in harmony. Next thing on my to-do list was to visit the factories, research labs and other parts of the company in the area. After finishing the tour, Tony called to confirm the meeting on Friday. Weird, normally it would be Pepper. I know things changed after The Sokovia Accords were introduced. The Avengers fell apart. Rhodey, Vision and Tony were the only ones left. Spider-Man went back to aunty May. The others were nowhere to be found. Not that it was impossible, but it' not like anyone except Ross tried hard. Tony was still depressed after learning the truth about his parents' death. I mean who wouldn't be?
The rest of the day went by without anything interesting happening. I climbed on the roof of the office building. The sunset is beautiful from there. It's May, days are getting longer. Yet the darkness is slowly coming. I see my empire colored by the warm sun slowly fading into the cold darkness. Sometimes I just sit here and wait until all the lights go out. Then the stars come out, reflecting in my turquoise colored eyes.
Another ordinary day behind me. I sit there till sunrise. There is still darkness in my eyes mirroring memories long forgotten, friends and family lost. For some reason sunrise fills me with hope, because whatever happens, no matter how bad things turn out the sun will always come out…
The rest of the week was boring, so I'll just jump straight to Friday. It was, well, chaotic. My phone rang at 3AM. A kidnapping, robbery and thief chasing later we finally returned to base. It was 5AM by than which meant I didn't even bother to try to go back to bed. So after a shower I went straight to my office to go over contracts and because I was bored I managed to go over all the paperwork prepared for Monday. My first meeting started at 10AM with a company from Chicago. They wanted to rent a big transporter to fly some components to India and back. Approved, flight scheduled two weeks from now. The next meeting wasn't that formal. Just my boys and I going over next year's EXPO plans. New jets and planes, new engine types... all of this in our pavilion. Thank god, we're doing this together with Stark Industries, which is why Tony's coming over in the afternoon to discuss everything further. Later I had two meetings in Washington. One was with the government about mutant affaires as they call it, the other with the military about new transport jets. Back at GNC there was a videoconference waiting to start with the UN committee. Sokovia accords, superhuman registration, they just wanted to know what I thought of the outcome. My teams already had a registration with permission to operate worldwide and since we don't cause unnecessary damage and clean up after ourselves, they let us work freely. I think the Sokovia accords were a good idea. Those who signed it showed that they respect the member countries of the UN and are willing to make compromises and take responsibility for their actions. Two weeks ago I got offered the position of the ambassador for mutant and superhuman rights and affaires, MSR for short. The conference ended with polite greetings and smiles.
Anyway, my BFF Tony came over after that. Since it was the last meeting for the day we moved it to the living room and forgot about formalities completely. We sat on the couch and talked a lot about the EXPO, business, saving the world…but Tony seemed off all the time. He was unusually quite.
"You know I know when something is wrong, Tony. Do you want to talk about it? It would help you." He looked at me with those big eyes of his and then continued to stare onto the opposite wall for the next 2 minutes. Then he leaned back, looked me in the eyes and said:"Pepper and I broke up. This time for good. Not just taking a break." "I'm sorry Tony. You two were cute together. Can I help you somehow?" Tony loved Pepper very much and she loved him. Tony's eyes watered up when he started to talk about the breakup. We talked the whole night through, eventually ended up asleep on the couch. This is going to be a long weekend. But at least we agreed on spending it together.