Hello! So, this is late, but not too late, so I'll take what I can get. Wrote this all in one sitting, so yeah, mind the typos. So, early Christmas gift!

Thanks for sticking around so long with my hectic schedule. :)


Chapter 7~

Alex was just about ready to throw his laptop out the window.

The one thing about being in a suburb just off a highway was the sheer amount of motels, hotels, service stations, and gas stations. With a change of clothes and an affable smile (and cash), he was able to purchase supplies and rent out a decent enough room from an inn on the road.

Upstate New York received little enough traffic that the concierge would remember his face, and remember it well. The only other people renting rooms were older men; truck drivers and the like.

The rooms were clean and the sheets washed, and the food was okay, but apparently, wireless connection ranked very, very low on their priority list. Alex could hardly secure a connection for more than three minutes.

The Answer was not a patient woman.

Alex was patient himself— to a certain degree. Every day that passed was another day that Xavier had to find him.

To be honest, Alex had made a far more successful spy than an assassin. It was so much easier to listen and observe; he had mastered innocuity, if not his own curiosity. As an assassin, he never took bribes, or 'jobs', not like Gregorovitch...or his father. He picked his own 'missions', and his own Targets. But no man was an island, and even Alex Rider would not be as successful in his infiltration experiences without the help of other people.

Smithers was a prodigious contact. When he'd first gone off the grid, Alex thought he was gone for good. He'd thought that was the last of Smithers he would ever see.

When Brooklyn Preparatory Academy had been destroyed, Alex had received a mysterious phone call. It was like something right out of a stereotypical Hitchcock film. He'd picked up, of course. At that moment, he hadn't cared enough not to, and even though the last of his closest family was dead, his accursed curiosity wasn't.

He'd received a link to a gaming website, and instructions to enter a certain cheat code into the server on a flash game. It'd taken him to a forum, and with that, Alex joined a secret society of burned agents; people free from the influence of the government to a certain extent. There were all sorts of people there, from the most despicable kind of hackers, people willing to sell government secrets for a lump sum of cash, to assassins for hire.

Smithers, who went by 'Inspector Gadget' online, connected him to sources he trusted enough to keep their profiles off of MI6's radar.

With a huff of frustration, Alex pulled on a sweater and grabbed his cell phone, stashing his laptop away into its proper carrier and shoving the bags into the lockbox the motel provided for its patrons. He couldn't investigate further without information, and he couldn't get more information from the Answer without internet.

He hated pointless setbacks.

The afternoon air was warmer than the day before, and he set off at a brisk walk. Within thirty minutes, he was at the service station that he stopped at before going to the motel.

Annoyed and exhausted, he headed straight to the back of the store where they kept phone cards and disposable cell phones behind a glass case.

The doorbell to the station jangled loudly, and the abrasive sound of teenage girl voices assaulted the formerly quiet store. Alex glanced at the people who entered, and quickly looked away; he'd remember that red hair anywhere. It was brighter than it was in the pictures, but her face and stuck vividly in his mind. Strong chin and jaw, wide green eyes, and straight prim nose...her genetic makeup was something out of fiction— no one's hair had the right to be that cherry red.

She'd also been the most powerful of any mutant he'd seen on the stolen files the Answer supplied him with— ever. It had sent chills down his spine to read her file, and the strange events the Answer's virtual partner, the Ask, had linked together with the burgeoning of her mutant powers and acceptance to Xavier's School for Gifted Students cemented the idea of her being a danger to him. Untrained, the girl had had the ability to tear down an entire wing of her elementary school. Now she was trained, to what extent he did not know.

She was a threat.

Jean Grey and another girl— Anna Marie Graham, codename, Rogue— were browsing the shelves of the packaging section of the gas station. Alex remembered Anna Marie's face in particular, though she looked entirely different from the frowning school photo the Answer had pulled from the depths of the virtual junkyard. Dyed hair and black makeup would do that to a girl, he supposed.

"Did you really have to wait for the last minute to tell everyone you needed tape, Rogue?" Jean's voice was heavy with exasperation as the two of them perused the shelves looking for clear packaging tape. "Nevermind the fact that you decided to wait until the last minute to work on a project!"

"I think you're asking the wrong question here, hun," Rogue's voice was a slow drawl. "I don't understand why a house as big as that one doesn't have tape! Tape of all things!"

"Uh-huh, sure," Jean's voice was bright, but Alex could hear a bit of nervousness underneath the certain tone of it all. "You're lucky Scott let me borrow his car. You know we're not supposed to be off school grounds right now."

Alex had to quickly avert his side glance, his eyes focused intently on the bright red Virgin Mobile modems for sale.

"I think you're worrying too much, Jean," Rogue said, picking up two different rolls of clear Scotch tape and squinting at the prices. "We're just down the road. What, you think this guy is just hidin' in the bushes, waiting to ambush us in the middle of the night?" Alex couldn't see her face, but the sarcasm was so heavy in her drawl he could practically hear her eye roll.

"Better safe than sorry, Rogue," Jean said, but when Alex glanced up he saw she was smiling. They weren't really worried he realized incredulously. Even with all he'd done, he was still was scared.

"Darlin' I can take care of myself." She triumphantly decided on a roll of tape and the pair strolled up to the counter, paid and left, chattering on about far more inane things.

He watched them as they got into a bright red fancy sports car and sped off, driving recklessly in the way that adrenaline addicted teenagers who could care less about car damages all drove.

Loud footsteps heralded the arrival of the gas station store owner. "You gonna buy somethin' or what?" he said gruffly. He probably suspected Alex was shoplifting— although he didn't know anyone who'd shoplift from a convenience store of all places.

Alex nodded and ignored the man's glare, bought the modem and a temporary debit card, paid in cash, and left the store as quietly and as quickly as he had entered it, with far more troubling thoughts on his mind.

Something about this "school" put him off. Infiltrating schools was practically second nature to him by now; the Massachusetts Academy and Point Blanc alike both had felt nothing and entirely like a school. But in Blanc, there'd been something wrong with the teachers and the atmosphere, and the Academy students had all been little world hating sociopathic freaks enabled by nihilistic world destroying instructors. At both schools, there was something fundamentally wrong with the atmosphere, and it always reflected back in the students.

These girls were literally teenage girls, out to buy tape for a school project. Had he not known what they truly were, it wouldn't have been out of the ordinary to hear two schoolgirls talking about procrastination and homework and the like, and worrying about being out after dark. The targets at the Academy had been little more than future recruits for the Hellfire Club. They could talk about nothing but their impending domination and extermination of humanity, carelessly running their mouths even in broad daylight.

His lip curled in disgust. Alex had shot more than half of those monsters point blank, and he couldn't muster a shred of regret over their death. They were animals, monsters that sought the death of innocent people that had never done anything to them. The kids at the Massachusetts Academy were the kind of people who acted like the world owed them something because they'd been hurt.

Alex had been hurt too— he couldn't get any satisfaction until he went seeking it with his own two hands, and half the time, it wasn't even worth it, to hurt the pathetic people who'd struck at him. Alex had never been really driven to seek revenge until Brooklyn Prep had blown, and suddenly he wasn't the only one suffering, and hundred of other people, people who'd never had the knife sink into them like that, people who hadn't been raised to become inured to the loss of family were suffering with him.

That had been enough to force him to act.

And these girls, he realized, student talk aside, were hardly innocent. Like Rogue had said herself— she could "take care of herself"- lethal force was nothing to these...to his Targets.

These mutants would die before the could hurt anyone, like the Hellfire Club and the Brotherhood of the End. He'd make sure of it.

Steeling his resolve, he turned back towards the motel, mentally rehearsing his interrogation for the Ask and the Answer. Alex Rider had made a rookie mistake in assuming that every mutant was the same, and he'd thought that he could approach every fanatic the same way— and he'd nearly died for it.

If he was best at espionage, well, he'd gladly hang up the mantle of assassin for a day, and Xavier and his boot camp for Gifted Students would go down if it was the last thing he did.


Charles Xavier tried his best to massage away the burgeoning stress headache.

There were many, many perks to being a telepath, especially one of his caliber— he'd spent his entire life practicing and honing his power to its apex, and he was rarely overwhelmed with foreign thoughts anymore, not like when he'd been young. But even at his age and level of mastery, there were times when he simply could not silence the thoughts of others.

Even more insidious were unconscious emotions that swept through a crowd.

This was the situation now.

Surrounded on all sides by his most senior X-Men, as they'd dubbed themselves jokingly back in the eighties when he'd first met Storm and her contemporaries, he was nearly strangled by the sheer force of their anxiety, horror, and in one stark disbelief.

He turned a narrowed on Logan, who solidly met his gaze with a glower.

The one rock in the sea of emotional distress was Beast, but Xavier could hardly take comfort in that; he radiated only grim satisfaction and sorrow at having been proven right.

Or what he believed was right. Xavier was not quite convinced. Something here didn't feel right, and as time went on, he'd found himself putting more faith in his instinct. It was undoubtedly an influence of Logan, but due to his mutation, his gut feelings were rarely random, and more often than not well-founded, even if he didn't necessarily know the reason.

Ororo had reached out to one of her many contacts— though she often lauded him as knowing everyone and their mother on the Eastern Seaboard, his network did not extend nearly as far Logan's, but then, Charles sometimes felt that Logan was the exception to generally everything— and brought back a dearth of frankly horrifying information.

It was quite one thing to hear the news and another to see forensic photography of the remains.

Oh, Charles knew that the worst of the murders had to have been buried— mutant crimes, against them or by them— were carefully under the control of most governments. They'd stopped being completely able to live away from the government's radar in the sixties when Charles was a young man and good friends still with Erik. If what he'd been able to glimpse in Logan's memories were accurate, then mutants had been under the eye of more zealous military sections as early as the late forties. But that was just barely before his time. And something told him, with the advent of camera phones and the 24-hour new cycle, the time of hiding beneath a veneer of deception was coming to end.

Even with all of, he still surprised himself at his naivete where the government was concerned. Xavier was considered cunning by his contemporaries— at least, Moira was absolutely wary of him and what she could see lay in his future, not that she would tell him— but still, every time he ended up entangled in delicate matters like this, he felt terribly out of his depth.

He had greatly underestimated how much energy the United Kingdom military intelligence had invested in burying the so-called London Mutant Murders.

According to the news, the London Mutant Murders was a killing spree totaling four murders of people with obvious morphological deformities— it was hyped up as a hate crime against the disfigured. The London Underground knew better though (being mutants themselves, they knew intimately what it was like to be targeted) and Cerebro had been able to find him even more, bringing the grand total up to fourteen victims and photos. Logan had confirmed the bodies were marks of an assassin, though not anyone he knew, not that he'd recognize it, with his fragmented memory.

Spread out across the multitude of screens that made up the expansive interface of Cerebro were the gruesome forensic photos of each of the crimes scenes of the fourteen victims. They were put down like rabid dogs, Ororo had thought sadly, a clean bullet through the face, throat, or temple. Only one body had been savaged— a John Doe who'd been clearly murdered by the Jane Doe they'd found next to him. His throat was torn out. She'd been killed with long, bloodied fangs bared open, her face frozen in a gruesome mask of violent death, self-disemboweled by long, fingernail-like claws.

Nothing about this clearly connected him to the boy Charles had sensed. But the last murder was what inexplicably tied it to the massacre at the Massachusetts Academy.

Xavier knew it was an extermination-worthy of the aspirations of the US military. But word of mouth had nothing on official military documentation, the kind Cerebro could not penetrate.

(He'd designed Cerebro to find mutants, not to hack the government. He was a geneticist and a teacher, not Tony Stark. Although, now he was beginning to debate whether that was more of his wishful thinking.)

Only the sentries outside the Massachusetts Academy were killed with bullets, in a way startlingly similar to the ones in London. The rest had been murdered by Shaw himself.

Sebastian Shaw was a madman. Xavier had made his acquaintance once in his youth, but Erik passionate hatred of the man had led him away from any more correspondence between the two. Charles had much to be thankful for as a result of his friendship with Erik, but this was one of the greatest things.

Shaw was a rampant murderer, one who killed humans and mutants he deemed too weak indiscriminately. He'd opened his 'school' soon after Charles had his, but was infinitely crueler. He did not preach superiority, as Erik did, which Charles firmly disagreed with but could almost respect, but utter annihilation.

"The rebirth of the world through a nuclear holocaust," Erik had sneered, his handsome lip curled in disgust. "As if holocaust could ever be anything but a tragedy."

It was a comment Charles had never asked Erik about in detail.

But Shaw was thankfully a fringe cult in mutant society. And now, he was dead, and even though his death and the murder of all his acolytes was something Charles should have mourned, he could only find thankfulness in his heart.

That, and apprehension.

"He turned on his own people," he murmured from behind his folded hands. "That does seem like something he would have done…"

"You don't see this, Charles?" Hank asked disbelievingly.

"I don't see anything but tragedy," Ororo said tiredly. Can we take the pictures down?"

They were rather disturbing, Charles thought as he minimized the windows with the mental interference easily.

"Hank's right," Logan growled, clenching his fists. "Look at the pictures. Same exact MO. Except maybe the death counts are reversed. And Shaw was a nut, but he was a smart nut. He ain't no Jim Jones."

Hank glanced through his glasses at the forensic reports. "Same caliber bullet too. That cannot be a coincidence. Same bullet, and then someone murders their followers— Charles— "

"What I do not understand," Ororo interrupted Hank, as they'd had this argument several times over the past six hours they'd been going through everything Ororo's contact had gotten them, "is why you are so sure that this killer is a seventeen-year-old young boy!"

"There is only one thing that we can do," Charles decided, eyes bright as an idea came to his mind, "We must find Alex Rider."

"Cerebro only gave us a partial profile," Ororo asked, confused. "How are we going to find him?"

"I've been locating young mutants in distress for twenty years before I had Cerebro, my friend," he smiled genially, subversively sending waves of ease around the room. "We'll do it the same way I found you."

"I don't think he's going to flood a village by accident, Charles," Ororo said dryly.

"No," he said, "but you," he nodded at Logan, "and Rahne and Kitty are both intimately familiar with his mind. You've fought him, and survived— if he is the culprit," he raised a hand at Hank, gesturing for peace, "that sort of interaction forges a psychic connection, weak and tenuous. In your mind, your enemies hold a place of significance almost as crucial as the ones you love. We can do nothing but wait."

"Wait for him to attack the children?" Hank growled.

"Wait for him to act hastily," Charles sharply corrected. "And when he try to attack, I'll bring Jean in here to use Cerebro and we'll incapacitate him. And this question will be settled. Personally, I don't think this Alex Rider is acting alone— his files are too sparse, and he was too afraid to be acting entirely of his own will. Or," here, he raised a questioning eyebrow. "Is Tabitha just as much a criminal for what her father forced her to do."

"This is not petty theft," Hank disagreed. "These are people's lives. Children's lives!"

"But," Logan said grimly, "we don't know for sure that this Rider kid really has anything to do with the other massacres." He held up one calloused finger, "We know the London Mutant Murderer is probably the same person who killed Shaw and all his lackeys. We know he's probably got some variation of hypnosis. We know Kitty and Rahne, and I were all attacked—"

"By someone who stole someone's mind from Kitty and had her attack Rahne!" Hank was almost shouting. Just for once, Charles wished he could be and bury his face in his hands. Things were bad indeed when Logan had to be the voice of reason.

"It's similar," Ororo interjected before it could escalate into a shouting match, again, "but not the same. I think we should do as the Professor says and wait. Be on our guard, and wait. We've played this game before, and we'll play it again."

The room was silent for a long while as everyone sat on their thoughts.

"I'll...go check up on Rahne and Kitty," Hank said stiffly. "I'll see you all in the morning."

"Please bring me Jean," Charles said as they all made their way out, lost in his thoughts. Ororo was the only one to acknowledge his request.

He had a long night ahead of him, and if the past few days were a sign, several more to come.


So that was chapter seven! Chapter Eight shouldn't take as long.

Thank you to Mowrotom314, MakaylaD.12, AutumnLeaves03, and my four anonymous guest reviewers! I might have been terrible with answering reviews, but I read every single one of them every time I need a pick me up! I always try to update this story first just because I know I have readers for it. I love you all!

Also, this chapter was very X-Men heavy. I know in the past reviewers have mostly been Alex Rider fans, so here's a quick rundown of who's who, if you haven't quite gotten it yet:

Charles-Professor Charles Xavier-Professor X (Telepath)

Ororo-Ororo Munroe-Storm (Weather Manipulation)

Hank-Hank McCoy-Beast (Big Blue Furry Beast :])

Logan-Logan (in X-Men: Evolution; but the history of Wolverine is long and complicated, so, yeah)-Wolverine (Accelerated Healing and Adamantium skeleton)

Kitty- Katherine "Kitty" Pryde- Shadowcat (Intangibility)

Jean Grey (Telepath and Telekinetic)

Rogue- Anna Marie "No Last Name Given"-(Takes anyone else's powers)

Erik-Erik Lensherr-Magneto-Magnet-kinesis (lol)

Sebastien Shaw-I pulled heavily from Wolverine and the X-Men for Hellfire Club and X-Men: First Class for Shaw and Magneto's backstory, though Magneto's backstory coincides strangely well with X-Men: Evolution.

Okay, so I know this chapter was slow, but it'll pick up soon! Let me know what you think in a review!

YellowWomanontheBrink

December 15, 2016

11:16 PM