TITLE: Children of the Evolution
AUTHOR: Simone of the Zordiak
DISTRIBUTION: Just tell me where you put it, 'k?
DISCLAIMER: All things Buffy belong to Joss, but he's mean, so I 'borrowed' them. (I give them back when I'm finished... I swear) All things X-Men belong to Marvel... I think.
SUMMARY: Some people seem to be unable to learn from their mistakes. The Initiative is dead and buried, but they still want their Supersoldier. And so they start a chain-reaction with consequences far beyond their imagination.
FEEDBACK: Please.
CATEGORY: AU/Adventure/Crossover
RATING: ?
PAIRING: Not sure, yet.
AUTHORS NOTES: I am not a native English speaker, so I hope you will forgive me my mistakes (spelling and grammar).
The X-Men are mostly from the MovieVerse, with some mixed in stuff from the comics. I went AU after XMen Movie I, the stuff of XMen II has not yet happened in this story and I don't think it will happen.
"quote" is speech
#quote# is telepathy
Children of the Evolution
--- Chapter 1 ---
When they stopped using the sedatives it felt like his mind was wading through quicksand. Like waking from a dreamless sleep into a nightmare. Erik Lehnsherr woke up, feeling sore and weak and disoriented. He tried sitting up, but his arms were shaking so much, that he fell back onto his mattress again. But someone had noticed his struggle, was in fact coming over to help him sit up. A glass of something was pressed against his lips and despite his fear of it being tampered with, he drank, he was simply too thirsty not to. It was water. Pure, simple, untainted water and it felt like heaven running down his parched throat.
He waited until his breathing had turned to normal again, then he looked up to see who ha helped him. It was a young man, barley twenty if he had to guess, with shaggy brown hair and brown eyes that remembered him painfully at the people in the camps... eyes that had seen too much. The other wore a simple white shirt and drawstring-pants and on the right side of the shirt there was a big black nine. And the most important thing he noticed was the unstable magnetic field the other emitted.
"Who are you?"
"I'm Xander. Or specimen nine if you ask the mad docs out there."
A specimen! So it had already begun. His greatest fear was once more reality.
He had so many questions, but whatever they had done to him, Erik was too tired and weak to stay conscious for long.
---
Over the next three days he woke sporadically, as his body fought against the last of the sedatives and tried to replace what the scientists had stolen from him.
When he woke, Xander was there, to help, to talk and he listened and learned. He nearly laughed in bitter irony as he learned that the government was trying to duplicate his mutation in normal people... hadn't he been locked up for trying to mutate people against their will? He learned more about the process Xander had been subjected to and that the young man was so far the only one who had succeeded in gaining his powers.
Powers, Xander wasn't very happy about. There were the extra senses, that had just kicked him which allowed him to feel magnetic fields. Erik had lived with his powers for more than fifty years, but he still could remember how he had felt after the first rush had been over. All his senses had suddenly gained extra-uses and it had felt like he was a baby and had to learn to use them all over again. Added to the fact that while his own magnetic field was very stable, weak right now, but stable, Xander's was anything but. To Erik it felt like sitting next to a wildly strobing and always colorchanging discolight.
At the fourth day, after two hours of trying to ignore Xander's magnetic field, he finally craved and started teaching him. He knew the scientists had brought them together for him to teach the young man, but despite that knowledge he couldn't ignore the young mans plight. Firstly it wasn't Xander's fault that he had wound up here and Xander was as much a prisoner to those madmen as he was and secondly, no matter how he had become a mutant, Xander was a mutant now and with his powers being like his own, Erik knew exactly how to help him. And lastly, he couldn't help but feel a touch of paternal pride. While the boy was not his son, he was carrying his genes, his powers. Maybe he could train him to be his successor, his heir when he was no longer able to carry on. Also there was the fact, that even with him teaching Xander, it would take years for the young man to hone his powers. He himself had needed more than five years to be in complete control of them. If the people behind this project really wanted Alexander as their model for a new type of soldier, they would have to wait until he was in control of his powers. And five years were a lot of time to plan ones escape.
And revenge.
---
Six days after Willow had established the mindlink, she finally found out where Xander was held. She had hacked into the right database and she was shocked at the things she discovered.
This couldn't be right! Hadn't they stopped the Initiative only two years ago? Did those people never learn? She shuddered as she read the detailed fates of the specimens, finding some relieve in the fact that both Xander and Riley were still alive. But Riley's health was anything but and Xander had been locked up in a cell with the one only labelled as zero, meaning that he had displayed the mutation the shady government people were wanting. Which meant a lot of unpleasantness in Xander's future, if they didn't bring those people down.
At first Willow had thought of it like a rescue mission, but now that she knew the truth of this project, a rescue mission wasn't enough. Those projects had to be shut down, and shut down for good.
She reached out through the link and showed Xander the results of her search. They had a long talk and planning session, before she collected her purse and went to the magic box.
When she had gone to England after her breakdown, she had promised to only use magic in emergencies. This was an emergency and she would need all her witchcraft working to pull off the plan she and Xander had hatched.
---
When he felt the little tingle in his head that signalled him, that Willow had done the first spell, he nearly cried with relief. Yesterday the food and drinks had been laced with sedatives and when he'd woken, he'd been strapped down on an examination table and there had been 'Tests'. Even with the healing factor removing every trace of injury in minutes, the psychological scars lingered for much longer.
Then, when he had woken out of the second narcosis, once more back in the cell he shared with Erik, he had shaken for hours until he finally had calmed down.
Xander closed his eyes and prayed to all benevolent gods he had read about in his years as a Scooby, that Willows spell would do what they thought it should do.
Slowly, painfully slowly and oh so carefully he reached out to the mind of his cellmate, until the link was established.
#Erik... please don't freak out or let them see your reaction.#
#Xander? I thought you were a human before they caught you or it the telepathy a new developement?#
#Neither. I was 100% human yes, but I have a friend who's a practising wicca. She established the mindlink for us. Say hi to Willow.#
#Uh, hi Xand. Hello Mr Lehnsherr.#
#Good evening, Miss Willow, was it? I'm quite suprised that someone could establish a telepathic connection when even my old friend Charles had not managed to contact me yet.#
#That's because I don't use telepathy, but witchcraft. The entire compound has been lined with a thin layer of a metal-alloy to block out telepaths, but I am using a bit of Xander's blood in the Communis Familis spell. And I could only reach out to create a link with you, because they injected Xander with so much of your genetic material that the spell thinks you are related.#
#That is quite fascinating, Miss Willow. Are you telling me that witchcraft is real? And where did you find the information about this compound?#
#Of course it is real. Witchy Willow here, remember? I do tons with it... uhmmm did tons with it, but I got a bit out of line. But it is all better now. And the info... well I sorta hacked the government security systems a bit?#
---
Xander's friend was marvellous. Not only did she talk without the need for punctuation, but she had also manage to stabilise the link so he and Xander could use it without her present and she had found a rather astonishing amount of information about the project they were used for.
And she was a witch. Here he was, a 74 year old, very powerful mutant and he had never even wasted a thought at the possibility that witchcraft could be real. Actually he had doubted it until the moment when Xander had allowed him access to his memories. Some of the things he saw the redhead do looked like things he knew other mutants could do, but there was no mutant that could do all those things. And there were other things... beings in Xander's mind, that reminded him of the legends and ghost stories his father liked to tell him when he brought him to bed, a long... long time ago.
It was quite a shock to learn that most of it was real. His entire life he'd looked down at those people that weren't able to realise that they were thinking in little boxes, only to learn that he had done the same.
What else had he missed? What else was there?
Aliens?
Parallel dimensions? No wait, those had already been proven to exist by that strange ragtag group Alexander was part of.
Erik Lehnsherr was not a very religious man, but he felt scared by the fact that those young adults had seen evidence of the existence of heaven and hell.
But he could think about it all after he had gotten out of here. And thanks to Willow and her information about the project, they now had a plan.
It was not something he would have tried alone, but if he could train Alexander for at least half a month and have Willow prepare things from the outside this could free them and make the USA loose face in front of the entire United Nations.
And they would never dare to try something like that again.
---
It had been twenty days and everything was ready. It was time. Together the two magnetic mutants reached out with their senses for the layer of alloy they knew was there to keep out telepaths. The found it and then they pushed.
The earth started to shake as the underground-complex was forced upwards. Higher and higher through earth and stone and whatever.
Once, when he had tried to find the limits of his power, Erik had lifted a sunken Russian submarine from the bottom of the sea. 25000 ton of steel plus the water that was in it. He had managed to do so without overtaxing himself, but this was different. If not for Alexander working with him in concert and Willow casting a spell to easen their burden, he wouldn't have even thought about it.
But so he pushed and lifted and forced the complex higher and higher until it finally burst through the air, destroying a street and half a park while doing so; before the complex came to rest, barley half a mile from the UN building, New York.
If Willow had done her job, then she had sold the story to at least half a dozend news stations and had displayed the hacked files openly on the internet. And now the last, the final prove was here. Nobody could deny the existence of the project now.
The project was finished, the USA had a lot to explain and he would get out of this hellhole.
And Erik Lehnsherr sank into blissful unconsciousness, with a smile on his face.
tbc
AUTHOR: Simone of the Zordiak
DISTRIBUTION: Just tell me where you put it, 'k?
DISCLAIMER: All things Buffy belong to Joss, but he's mean, so I 'borrowed' them. (I give them back when I'm finished... I swear) All things X-Men belong to Marvel... I think.
SUMMARY: Some people seem to be unable to learn from their mistakes. The Initiative is dead and buried, but they still want their Supersoldier. And so they start a chain-reaction with consequences far beyond their imagination.
FEEDBACK: Please.
CATEGORY: AU/Adventure/Crossover
RATING: ?
PAIRING: Not sure, yet.
AUTHORS NOTES: I am not a native English speaker, so I hope you will forgive me my mistakes (spelling and grammar).
The X-Men are mostly from the MovieVerse, with some mixed in stuff from the comics. I went AU after XMen Movie I, the stuff of XMen II has not yet happened in this story and I don't think it will happen.
"quote" is speech
#quote# is telepathy
Children of the Evolution
--- Chapter 1 ---
When they stopped using the sedatives it felt like his mind was wading through quicksand. Like waking from a dreamless sleep into a nightmare. Erik Lehnsherr woke up, feeling sore and weak and disoriented. He tried sitting up, but his arms were shaking so much, that he fell back onto his mattress again. But someone had noticed his struggle, was in fact coming over to help him sit up. A glass of something was pressed against his lips and despite his fear of it being tampered with, he drank, he was simply too thirsty not to. It was water. Pure, simple, untainted water and it felt like heaven running down his parched throat.
He waited until his breathing had turned to normal again, then he looked up to see who ha helped him. It was a young man, barley twenty if he had to guess, with shaggy brown hair and brown eyes that remembered him painfully at the people in the camps... eyes that had seen too much. The other wore a simple white shirt and drawstring-pants and on the right side of the shirt there was a big black nine. And the most important thing he noticed was the unstable magnetic field the other emitted.
"Who are you?"
"I'm Xander. Or specimen nine if you ask the mad docs out there."
A specimen! So it had already begun. His greatest fear was once more reality.
He had so many questions, but whatever they had done to him, Erik was too tired and weak to stay conscious for long.
---
Over the next three days he woke sporadically, as his body fought against the last of the sedatives and tried to replace what the scientists had stolen from him.
When he woke, Xander was there, to help, to talk and he listened and learned. He nearly laughed in bitter irony as he learned that the government was trying to duplicate his mutation in normal people... hadn't he been locked up for trying to mutate people against their will? He learned more about the process Xander had been subjected to and that the young man was so far the only one who had succeeded in gaining his powers.
Powers, Xander wasn't very happy about. There were the extra senses, that had just kicked him which allowed him to feel magnetic fields. Erik had lived with his powers for more than fifty years, but he still could remember how he had felt after the first rush had been over. All his senses had suddenly gained extra-uses and it had felt like he was a baby and had to learn to use them all over again. Added to the fact that while his own magnetic field was very stable, weak right now, but stable, Xander's was anything but. To Erik it felt like sitting next to a wildly strobing and always colorchanging discolight.
At the fourth day, after two hours of trying to ignore Xander's magnetic field, he finally craved and started teaching him. He knew the scientists had brought them together for him to teach the young man, but despite that knowledge he couldn't ignore the young mans plight. Firstly it wasn't Xander's fault that he had wound up here and Xander was as much a prisoner to those madmen as he was and secondly, no matter how he had become a mutant, Xander was a mutant now and with his powers being like his own, Erik knew exactly how to help him. And lastly, he couldn't help but feel a touch of paternal pride. While the boy was not his son, he was carrying his genes, his powers. Maybe he could train him to be his successor, his heir when he was no longer able to carry on. Also there was the fact, that even with him teaching Xander, it would take years for the young man to hone his powers. He himself had needed more than five years to be in complete control of them. If the people behind this project really wanted Alexander as their model for a new type of soldier, they would have to wait until he was in control of his powers. And five years were a lot of time to plan ones escape.
And revenge.
---
Six days after Willow had established the mindlink, she finally found out where Xander was held. She had hacked into the right database and she was shocked at the things she discovered.
This couldn't be right! Hadn't they stopped the Initiative only two years ago? Did those people never learn? She shuddered as she read the detailed fates of the specimens, finding some relieve in the fact that both Xander and Riley were still alive. But Riley's health was anything but and Xander had been locked up in a cell with the one only labelled as zero, meaning that he had displayed the mutation the shady government people were wanting. Which meant a lot of unpleasantness in Xander's future, if they didn't bring those people down.
At first Willow had thought of it like a rescue mission, but now that she knew the truth of this project, a rescue mission wasn't enough. Those projects had to be shut down, and shut down for good.
She reached out through the link and showed Xander the results of her search. They had a long talk and planning session, before she collected her purse and went to the magic box.
When she had gone to England after her breakdown, she had promised to only use magic in emergencies. This was an emergency and she would need all her witchcraft working to pull off the plan she and Xander had hatched.
---
When he felt the little tingle in his head that signalled him, that Willow had done the first spell, he nearly cried with relief. Yesterday the food and drinks had been laced with sedatives and when he'd woken, he'd been strapped down on an examination table and there had been 'Tests'. Even with the healing factor removing every trace of injury in minutes, the psychological scars lingered for much longer.
Then, when he had woken out of the second narcosis, once more back in the cell he shared with Erik, he had shaken for hours until he finally had calmed down.
Xander closed his eyes and prayed to all benevolent gods he had read about in his years as a Scooby, that Willows spell would do what they thought it should do.
Slowly, painfully slowly and oh so carefully he reached out to the mind of his cellmate, until the link was established.
#Erik... please don't freak out or let them see your reaction.#
#Xander? I thought you were a human before they caught you or it the telepathy a new developement?#
#Neither. I was 100% human yes, but I have a friend who's a practising wicca. She established the mindlink for us. Say hi to Willow.#
#Uh, hi Xand. Hello Mr Lehnsherr.#
#Good evening, Miss Willow, was it? I'm quite suprised that someone could establish a telepathic connection when even my old friend Charles had not managed to contact me yet.#
#That's because I don't use telepathy, but witchcraft. The entire compound has been lined with a thin layer of a metal-alloy to block out telepaths, but I am using a bit of Xander's blood in the Communis Familis spell. And I could only reach out to create a link with you, because they injected Xander with so much of your genetic material that the spell thinks you are related.#
#That is quite fascinating, Miss Willow. Are you telling me that witchcraft is real? And where did you find the information about this compound?#
#Of course it is real. Witchy Willow here, remember? I do tons with it... uhmmm did tons with it, but I got a bit out of line. But it is all better now. And the info... well I sorta hacked the government security systems a bit?#
---
Xander's friend was marvellous. Not only did she talk without the need for punctuation, but she had also manage to stabilise the link so he and Xander could use it without her present and she had found a rather astonishing amount of information about the project they were used for.
And she was a witch. Here he was, a 74 year old, very powerful mutant and he had never even wasted a thought at the possibility that witchcraft could be real. Actually he had doubted it until the moment when Xander had allowed him access to his memories. Some of the things he saw the redhead do looked like things he knew other mutants could do, but there was no mutant that could do all those things. And there were other things... beings in Xander's mind, that reminded him of the legends and ghost stories his father liked to tell him when he brought him to bed, a long... long time ago.
It was quite a shock to learn that most of it was real. His entire life he'd looked down at those people that weren't able to realise that they were thinking in little boxes, only to learn that he had done the same.
What else had he missed? What else was there?
Aliens?
Parallel dimensions? No wait, those had already been proven to exist by that strange ragtag group Alexander was part of.
Erik Lehnsherr was not a very religious man, but he felt scared by the fact that those young adults had seen evidence of the existence of heaven and hell.
But he could think about it all after he had gotten out of here. And thanks to Willow and her information about the project, they now had a plan.
It was not something he would have tried alone, but if he could train Alexander for at least half a month and have Willow prepare things from the outside this could free them and make the USA loose face in front of the entire United Nations.
And they would never dare to try something like that again.
---
It had been twenty days and everything was ready. It was time. Together the two magnetic mutants reached out with their senses for the layer of alloy they knew was there to keep out telepaths. The found it and then they pushed.
The earth started to shake as the underground-complex was forced upwards. Higher and higher through earth and stone and whatever.
Once, when he had tried to find the limits of his power, Erik had lifted a sunken Russian submarine from the bottom of the sea. 25000 ton of steel plus the water that was in it. He had managed to do so without overtaxing himself, but this was different. If not for Alexander working with him in concert and Willow casting a spell to easen their burden, he wouldn't have even thought about it.
But so he pushed and lifted and forced the complex higher and higher until it finally burst through the air, destroying a street and half a park while doing so; before the complex came to rest, barley half a mile from the UN building, New York.
If Willow had done her job, then she had sold the story to at least half a dozend news stations and had displayed the hacked files openly on the internet. And now the last, the final prove was here. Nobody could deny the existence of the project now.
The project was finished, the USA had a lot to explain and he would get out of this hellhole.
And Erik Lehnsherr sank into blissful unconsciousness, with a smile on his face.
tbc