Readers,
You'll start to notice as the story goes on that my version of Mister Sinister may differ slightly from what you may be familiar with. Still a massive threat, to be sure, but I've tweaked him to fit in the Evolution universe as well as my own personal needs. Not to worry. He's still every bit as diabolical and dangerous as you're expecting.
Hori out.
There was not much in the entirety of the world that could rattle Laura Kinney. Not after all she had endured in her long life. At times it felt as though her emotional senses were as dull as her claws were sharp. Violence, death, blood, all the horrors of the world inspired almost nothing in her. She supposed that was what allowed her to keep working with Sinister and his ilk. Be it Gorgeous George's foul and lecherous disposition, Hairbag's wanton lust for inflicting pain, or Ramrod's simple and honest cruelty, she could shrug it off and move on. Even Sinister, whom she had witnessed orchestrating more kinds of pain than even she had imagined existed, conjured little more in her than a casual sort of caution.
The science wing of The Ark, however, managed to send a cold rush down her spine on almost a daily basis. In particular, the stasis chambers.
She did not like venturing there, but with Sinister spending almost every waking moment in it's depths testing this or observing that, she was often compelled to be at his side more often than she would have ever liked.
She passed a hand over a console, and the large doors before her hissed open, greeting her with a rush of freezing air that caused her to tighten her jaw as she walked forward into the long, sterile corridor, a thin sheen of frost crunching underfoot as she went. When the science wing had been occupied by the many scientists that now lay dead and burning outside in the facility's main causeway, they had worn thick hooded jackets and mittens, lined with synthetic fur to combat the below-freezing temperatures. Laura did not have to take such precautions. The same healing factor that had kept Wolverine young and resilient all those years flowed through her veins as well, and she could practically feel the rush in her still-young body's core as it's internal mechanisms fought against the cold. And won.
The corridor opened up suddenly, and she felt the massive size of the chamber all around her, though she neglected to look anywhere besides the ground in front of her feet. Above her and to either side were thousands upon thousands of man-sized pods, like bulbous white coffins, the vast majority of which hummed dully with the power that kept their life support systems cranking away. Not that these pods needed much power. It didn't take much to keep a body alive and in suspended animation. Even a mutant body.
Much as she tried to reason with herself, to steel herself against the odd sensation of dread that she felt each time she entered the science wing, she could not conquer the childlike rush of anxiety that gripped her as she advanced. It was like taking a stroll through a living morgue, eyes peering out from the pods, half-lidded and lifeless, like the accusing stares of vengeful wraiths. She had made the mistake the first time of inspecting several of the pods out of sheer, morbid curiosity, and had found more familiar faces beneath the frosted plates of glass than she would have imagined. The feelings of horror and guilt would not leave her, much to her own consternation.
They're as good as dead, she reasoned with herself, No reason to get upset.
Part of it, she accepted, was due to her own experiences as a lab rat in the revived Weapon X program all those many decades ago. The cold, unfeeling nature of the facility, the sterile look of the white and gunmetal materials that adorned and made up the many rooms, the brutal, awful efficiency of it all. In a way, it had been rather cathartic to put all those scientists to the blade in the day-long massacre that Sinister had ordered. Every life that ended, every pair of eyes that flickered as death overtook them, was a small payback to the doctors that had made her what she was.
The feeling of elation did not last, as she knew it wouldn't. And her loathing and aversion for any facility that smacked of science and mutant experimentation and imprisonment would not be abated.
"Dwelling on the past again, are we, Laura?"
Laura snapped her head around and beheld Sinister. The deep cold and smell of chemicals in the chamber had masked his unnatural scent, and she was surprised to find him so close by without her noticing. Like her, he had no use for additional clothing to defend his body from the lethal chill. He wore a suit of fine black silk, pinstriped with single threads of red, and a black shirt and tie. Over that, a white lab coat outfitted with several medical devices designed for inspecting and evaluating the pods and their inhabitants. He spent a great deal of his time doing that now. She noted that his shoulders and his feet, clad in black leather shoes, were almost glistening with frost, practically frozen solid from his long hours spent there.
"You're not a psychic," Laura replied testily. She hated it when Sinister seemed to know what went on in her mind.
"Not yet," Sinister said mildly, paying only the slightest attention to her as he went to work on a pod, plugging his personal tablet into it's interface and reading the information that appeared on the glass screen.
Sinister let out a light chuckle as he regarded the data, and Laura felt hairs stand up on the back of her neck. She couldn't help but notice that his breath, somehow, did not frost when he exhaled. It was... unsettling.
"I knew I'd find you," Sinister said to the pod, reaching out and wiping the frosted glass to see inside. For the first time, Laura took note of how large the pod was. Definitely not a standard size.
"There are only so many men that would need a tank of these dimensions," Sinister said, entering information onto his tablet as he spoke to the pod in a manner akin to an adult admonishing a child "But it still wasn't easy to track you down in all this clutter, Mr. Marko."
Laura cocked an eyebrow. Why did that name sound familiar?
Again, almost as though he could read her thoughts, Sinister looked at Laura and gestured towards the pod, a cold, emotionless smile on his white face.
"Cain Marko," he said.
Laura couldn't hide her surprise. A fact that Sinister seemed to enjoy.
"Yes," he said, "The Juggernaut. Still alive after all these years. Not so surprising, really. He's spent the majority of the last five decades or so in some form of stasis or another, being shipped her and there. It's bound to keep a man young for a while," Sinister looked down at his tablet and made a tsk tsk'ing noise, "But such a long time, there's been massive damage to many of his internal organs."
"Another minion you want corked?" Laura asked, idly wiping the forming frost from the tanned skin of her bare arms. Sinister had found Hairbag, Ramrod, and George all in a similar manner. Their subsequent freedom was part of what kept them in Sinister's employ. That and the killing they got to do.
Sinister gave her a look as though she had grown another head. "Him? Of course, not, child. He's a criminal. A monster."
Laura balked. "Explain to me how that's different from... Any of us?"
Sinister was back to his usual routine of barely paying attention to her, his eyes now fixed back onto the data on his tablet, which he idly thumbed through with swipes of his white fingers.
"Because he's not a mutant, just a freak accident of... magic, science, whatever you want to call it," he said mildly, "And has no place in the future I'm building. You and the Nasty Boys have a role to play. You have something to contribute despite your lack of... refinement. And he does not."
He disconnected his personal computer from the pod and walked around to the side of the large containment unit. Laura took the opportunity to stand on her toes to look in. A massive, chiseled face greeted her, pale and dewey from decades of continuous stasis. His eyes were half-closed as so many of the others were, and his pupils stared, large and dark and lifeless. He was younger-looking than she would have expected, but she supposed stasis, like her own healing factor, could retard the steps of time as Sinister had said. Even after years of atrophy, his limp neck and shoulders bulged with muscle and promises of unrelenting strength. She was about to ask Sinister why he would bother looking for Marko when he didn't plan on freeing him or using him for some ghastly experiment when she heard him speak.
"Au revoir, Mr. Marko."
The pod gave a sudden jolt that surprised Laura enough to take a step back from it. She tilted her head and saw Sinister as he finished tearing the umbilical of life support cables that jutted from the side of the unit with one pull of his powerful arm. Embryonic liquid sprayed from the pod like blue blood from a gaping wound.
"What are you doing?" Laura asked, trying to hide the inexplicable alarm she felt.
"I told you," he said, dropping the mess of tangled cables that still sputtered fluids to the ground, "He has no place here."
Inside, she could see Marko's face begin to twitch and spasm as the technology that kept his limp body alive slowly gave out. A wave of alarms began to emit from the pod, and a holographic screen sprang to life beside it, displaying the mass of critical errors that resulted from the damage Sinister had done. A rapid beeping began as a monitor showed the giant man's heart struggle to return life to the dying body that housed it. He was quickly going into cardiac arrest.
It was all Laura could to do mask her disgust. Though she had done her fair share of executions, the idea of killing a man as he slept disquieted her.
The beeps turned into one long drone as Marko's heart finally gave out, and the man's body slumped forward, limp and heavy against the glass of the pod. The legendary unstoppable Juggernaut was dead.
Sinister regarded the pod for a long moment, a strange expression on his face that Laura could not readily identify. Something between mirth and satisfaction. Abruptly, he turned to face her, wiping the fluid from his hand onto his lab coat even as it froze on his skin.
"Did you need something, Laura?"
Laura began to remember herself then, her usual frigid and unsympathetic demeanor wrapping her up like a rough blanket against any scrutiny. She looked at the pod and then at Sinister with a practiced and calculated disinterest.
"SHIELD sent a message," she said, "They claim they're going to give in to your demands."
Sinister's eyes widened, and it seemed for a moment as though he might slap her there and then. "Why didn't you tell me as soon as you got down here, girl?"
Laura rolled her eyes, "Because it's bullshit, Essex. They'd never hand you the reins just like that. I don't even know why you're taking the time to deal with them at all."
He glared at her, one corner of his lip twitching, threatening to transform into an outright scowl. "If you were any other woman-"
"I'd be half as intelligent and even more useless to you than those goons upstairs," she challenged, referring to Sinister's 'Nasty Boys' as he had taken to calling them. "Don't get yourself all twisted up, Essex, they haven't even sent the codes yet, just implied that they will. You know they're going to have some bullcrap terms for their release to you, if they're even throwing straight dice here. This is SHIELD we're talking about, after all."
Sinister inhaled through he nose, long and deep, Laura once again taking note that his breath did not frost as hers did as he exhaled. Of all the things about Sinister that could disturb you, that was one of the strangest.
I could end this insanity right here, she thought, regarding the strange, unnatural man, feeling the claws in one forearm twitch slightly at the idea, End this right now.
She felt her muscles relax. She had had this debate with herself before and she knew it was folly. She had witnessed Logan's defeat, and had no reason to suppose that she would fare any better. Besides, Sinister had still yet to make good on his many promises to her, and his being dead wouldn't rectify that by any means.
Sinister seemed to relax as well, that familiar half smile returning to his face as he looked her up and down, some geniality coming back to him.
"One day, Laura," he said pleasantly, "That mouth is going to take you into dangerous ground that those lovely features won't be able to back you out of."
"My whole life is dangerous ground."
He laughed at that, the noise echoing through the chamber, and Laura was once again reminded of the hundreds of dead eyes that looked at her from the endless number of pods that stretched into the cold darkness as the sound bounced off of them. She fought a shiver.
Sinister began to walk down the corridor leading to the exit. At the same time, two of his troopers entered from the sliding door Laura had used. They approached at a brisk clip, in perfect synchronicity, their masked faces making them look more like ants that walked erect than men. Laura still hadn't gotten used to their smell. It was blood and placenta and medical equipment and armor. She wrinkled her nose at them and fought a primal urge to growl.
"Dispose of that," Sinister said, pointing at the darkened pod where Cain Marko had once slept. The troopers passed by them, barely even acknowledging that the man had spoken, but seeing about their task all the same.
"Essex, what are you even planning to do with all of them?" Laura asked, stealing one last glance at the pods before they were obscured from her vision by the walls and ceiling of the narrow corridor they had entered. He did not offer an answer until they were well beyond the freezing corridors of the stasis chamber, and for a while, Laura had assumed he hadn't heard her.
"We're going to build a new world," Sinister said finally. He often talked like that when discussing his grand designs. It was one of his more irritating features. Laura decided not to press the issue.
"And please, girl, for the last time, call me by my true name."
Laura shook her head irritably, "I feel like an idiot calling you by an adjective. What's so significant about it that you have to be called 'Sinister'?"
Again, a long pause came before Sinister answered. They had made their way onto The Ark's express lift before he spoke at all. The doors of the lift clicked shut, and they began to ascend to the upper levels of the ship to the communication deck.
"It was what my human wife called me," he said without any hint of emotion, "Before I killed her."
She felt his gaze burning on her as the lift carried them upward, and she finally turned to return his stare.
"You rather remind me of her," he smiled.
Laura gave no hint of reaction. After all, there was not much in the world that could rattle Laura Kinney.
