Disclaimer: Don't own Marvel.

Chapter 8

Budapest, Hungary

December 25, 2013

Steve never would have thought someone as stoic as Natasha could make him this angry.

Tony Stark was understandable. He was disrespectful, spoiled, flippant, and he felt the need to verbalize everything, no matter how disrespectful, spoiled, or flippant it was. And Steve was big enough to admit that he could be uptight and old-fashioned at times— it didn't matter. What mattered was that they were as opposite as opposites got. Of course Stark infuriated him.

Bruce Banner called the Avengers a "chemical mixture that makes chaos," and Steve had to agree. There was the aforementioned spoiled brat and the uptight super-soldier; the demi-god from another planet, who inexplicably smashed his empty mugs on the ground; the mild-mannered scientist turned enraged beast; and Clint Barton. In a team of big personalities— or plain oddities, in Barton's case— someone as composed as Natasha Romanoff was a welcome relief.

Of all of the Avengers, Natasha was the one he had seen himself working with after the Battle of New York. She was the only one Steve would have wagered he wouldn't have a problem with.

He supposed that was the point. She was the Black Widow—a specialist in subversion and espionage. Gaining people's trust was a part of the job description. Exploiting that trust was another.

If he didn't think about it very hard, it wasn't such an abhorrent quality. It was useful when a Russian mobsterdidn't want to divulge his safe combination on in a black bag operation like the one they'd just completed. But with a little bit of thought, it became painfully clear to him that she exploited the trust of her comrades as much as, if not more than, her enemies.

And the worst part was that she didn't seem to care. Even after tonight, when their mission had been a complete disaster.

The two of them were supposed to get in and out of an underground base without being spotted. Natasha was to install some spyware onto one of the organization's servers while Steve was her backup in case things went south.

Steve would be the first to admit that stealth wasn't his strongest suit (though of the Avengers, he was probably the third stealthiest, after Natasha and Hawkeye—this was more of a testament to the others' brashness than his secrecy). But it was straightforward enough. Nothing they hadn't done before.

What was unusual was that Steve wasn't in command—Natasha was. She called him up at ten in the morning on Christmas Eve, told him to get into the black SUV parked outside of his apartment building, and then abruptly hung up. He was curious and, admittedly, grumpy to be working on Christmas Eve, but he knew calling her back would get them nowhere. The flight to Budapest took seven hours, which he used to drill every other agent aboard with nonstop questions about the mission. Unfortunately, they were all as clueless as he was. They were also as annoyed as he was to be working on Christmas Eve—barring the pilot, who cheerfully informed Steve that he was thrilled to be out of the house because his in-laws were staying with them for two weeks—so Steve tried to rein in his growing frustration.

But if he was expecting answers from Natasha, he certainly didn't get any. When he arrived bleary-eyed on the tarmac, she threw him a nondescript black uniform, told him it was a black bag op, and that he was her backup.

He drove them in. The base was in a tiny town about an hour's drive from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s only airbase in Hungary, and all five levels of it were located beneath a functional car factory. Once they were in, it didn't take Natasha long to find what she was looking for.

"Anyone comes through that door, take them out," she ordered, pulling out a memory stick and inserting into the foreign computer. Then she glanced up at the screens, paused, and said wryly, "Or I could just give you a heads-up if I see someone coming."

Curiously, he followed her gaze. Conveniently enough, the base's security cameras fed directly into the room.

It was a little too convenient for Steve's tastes. "Where are the guards?" he asked, glancing around the room, in case they somehow missed a guard snoozing at his post.

Not taking her eyes off of the code, she smirked. "It's three AM on Christmas morning," she replied dryly, as though that was answer enough. "Or maybe we're just lucky."

A pause. "What?"

She sighed. "This isn't their security control room," she said, more seriously. "That's one floor up."

"And you know this how?"

She glanced at him over her shoulder with a carefully groomed eyebrow raised. Seriously?

Steve closed his eyes. Of course. She always knew something he didn't. The day Natasha was open and honest with him was the day S.H.I.E.L.D. won a Nobel Peace Prize. "And you thought keeping the layout to yourself would make this an interesting challenge for me, right?"

She didn't answer him; whether she was consumed with the task or dodging the question, he didn't know.

He tried asking something he knew she would have to answer. "Security control room is on the floor above, right? And we can see everything they see?"

"Yes."

"So, didn't they see us?" He pointed at the black-and-white screen labeled 'LVL2 SVR1.' He hadn't looked up for cameras when they came in—under strict orders from Nat—but he knew that was the one directly over the door he was standing beside now.

"Uniforms." Steve looked down at the itchy black uniform she'd thrown at him earlier that evening and crossed his arms. It would have been nice to know before they'd come in, but he was apparently on a 'need-to-know' basis.

And now he wondered why she chose him to be her backup at all. At the risk of sounding arrogant, people didn't usually call him in to be backup—they called Captain America to lead a charge or when they were spread thin and needed someone who could fight like ten men. He suspected the real reason he didn't get called in to be backup was because he didn't follow orders very well and everyone knew it.

Movement in one of the screens caught his attention, the one labeled LVL5 PRI3. He had to squint. Even then it was hard to know what was happening on the grainy screen.

"What's that?"

Natasha didn't hear him. Whatever she was doing had her full attention.

Keeping a careful eye on the camera outside of their door—so they wouldn't be ambushed—he inched closer. At first, he wasn't sure what he was looking at; there was a lot of movement and the area was dimly lit by flickering lamps. It was only when he saw pale hands reaching out from between bars that he realized he was looking down a row of prison cells. There were two figures in black struggling with a third in the middle. He stepped closer again…

…and recoiled when one of the figures in black slashed forward. The prisoner's head rolled off of his shoulders, black blood pouring from his severed neck, spreading out across the floor, under the cell doors, under their boots as they walked away, leaving the body and head in full view. Thin arms and hands reached out of the cells, but there was no sound so he could not hear them screaming.

"Holy shit."

Surprised to hear him swear, Natasha glanced up. She saw the carnage, the grasping hands…

…and went right back to work. "Leave it alone, Cap," she warned.

He gaped at her turned back. He couldn't believe how unaffected she was.

Scratch that. Of course I can believe it.

"'Leave it alone'?" he sputtered. "Like hell."

Damn it, if only I had my shield… He didn't know how many people they had locked up down there, but he was certain he could get them out. He'd done it before with the 107th—and that had been on his own. With Natasha by his side, they would certainly succeed.

"What are you going to do?" she asked calmly, still typing away. He wanted to rip the keyboard from under her fingers.

"I'm going to free those people before they all get killed."

Finally, the typing stopped. Natasha's voice was quiet. "The mission is paramount."

His hand hovered over the door handle. Had he been a slower man, he would've ignored her. But with four simple words, Steve began to understand her play, and he had to pull the thread.

When he looked back at their night in the pale light of the morning, this was the moment he recognized as the one where he lost control.

He turned back to her. Her face, as always, was stone.

"You knew they were here." Her silence was answer enough. He fumed, "Of course you did."

Natasha lifted her chin. "Honestly—"

"I doubt it," he muttered.

If he didn't know any better, he'd say a flash of hurt flickered through her eyes. For all he knew, she feigned the emotion to make him feel guilty.

"—honestly," she repeated. "I hoped you wouldn't find out."

"Why?"

"Because I knew you'd react like this."

He clenched his jaw. To her, he was nothing more than a child. "Well, I'm reacting 'like this'. What are you going to do?"

To her credit, she seemed surprised. "I… don't know what you mean."

"Don't lie to me," he snapped. "You said you 'hoped' I wouldn't find out. But you planned for it, just in case, right?"

"We don't have time for this—"

He interrupted, "I know we don't. But if you don't want me to compromise the mission, then you'll give me a good reason."

Natasha was silent for a brief moment, probably to formulate the best way to present some half-truth. "Do you know who gets weapons from the Syndicate?" she asked quietly.

"No." Because you didn't tell me anything.

"Terrorist groups, warlords, dictators—and they use them to kill innocent people. S.H.I.E.L.D. could take them out one by one, but that's time-consuming; more people would die while we tried to track them down."

She pointed at the computers behind her. "This is where we stop all of that, by cutting off their supply line. So it's your choice: you can save fifty now… or you can save thousands in the long run."

She was right, of course. But she hadn't said a word of this on the car ride from Budapest, nor when he got off the plane, nor in any of her texts when she initially called him in. The only conclusion he could draw from this was that there was something more that she didn't want to disclose.

Nevertheless, she had him. No matter what her real reasons were, she knew exactly what to say to make him stand down.

He let out a huff of frustration, but removed his hand from the handle. She nodded thankfully.

But Steve needed to know one more thing.

"Why'd you call me in at all?" he asked bitterly. "You clearly don't need me here. And even if you did need backup, why didn't you ask someone who was better at following orders?"

Natasha gazed at him. "Because I trust you," she replied simply.

He scoffed. "Yeah, well, the feeling's not mutual." Her eyes darted to her feet for a moment before they returned to meet his glare.

She was still manipulating him, even now. He clenched his jaw. "Finish this. Before I change my mind."

Natasha obeyed, but Steve knew he was the one taking orders.

Steve drove them back to the airbase. Natasha spent the entire hour feverishly tapping away on her phone in silence, which he was glad for. He didn't think he could stop himself from shouting if she tried to justify what just happened.

If the agent who debriefed them back at the airfield thought it was strange that Natasha relayed all of the mission details while Steve fumed in silence, he didn't let on. Like most S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, he was a no-nonsense sort of fellow. Watching the two of them speak was a bit like watching Spock dictate to telephone pole for all the warmth they had (he'd finally gotten around to watching a couple of episodes of Star Trek).

Steve had found himself questioning the wisdom of his choice to join S.H.I.E.L.D. more and more these days. Whether he was on a mission with Natasha or Rumlow or arguing with Fury over his more morally dubious decisions, he had to remind himself why he was here.

Like Natasha said, he had to look at it in the long run. The Syndicate—as she called it—was selling weapons to bad people. Those bad people were killing thousands. So in the long run, they saved thousands of lives. By that logic, Natasha did care.

But he didn't believe it. And for once, he would learn the truth.

Natasha knew better than to say anything more than a terse 'bye' when he stopped in front of the quinjet that would take him back to DC. He held out his arm to keep her from fleeing.

"I want you to tell me the truth," he said quietly; or as quietly as was possible over the roar of the engines. "What were you hiding?"

Natasha cocked her head, her hands fiddling with one another. For a moment, he was reminded of Mal, who was in perpetual motion and seemed much friendlier for it. "Why do you think I was hiding something?"

Steve shook his head. "If you have anyrespect for me, you'll tell me the truth right now."

He supposed Natasha could tell that he was dead serious, because all of her twitchiness stilled. Her eyes narrowed, the crease between her eyebrows smoothed, and her hands went behind her back. She dropped the façade she'd begun to develop around him—the playfully dry woman he almost enjoyed being around—and became the Black Widow.

"I do trust you, Steve," she said quietly, and though she was cold, he could finally believe her. "I asked you to be my backup because we had no room for failure." Here she paused for a moment, as if considering whether or not to reveal the truth.

"Tony Stark has taken a personal interest in the success of this mission."

He gaped at her. "What?" he half-sputtered, half-laughed. "Does S.H.I.E.L.D. work for Stark now?" Steve couldn't imagine a world in which Nick Fury agreed to do Tony Stark's dirty work. And then the other shoe dropped. "I just did a job for Stark?"

Black Widow gave him a look that made an agent loading the quinjet behind him squeak in fear. "I said he'd taken a personal interest, not that he was master and commander. The founding members of the Syndicate were originally Stark Industries employees who used their connections to steal weapons out of his factories. It's a matter of principle for him."

"Since when does S.H.I.E.L.D. care what Stark wants?"

She raised one shoulder and lowered it. "Stark's a businessman."

"What does that mean?"

"It means he doesn't do things out of the kindness of his heart."

"So, what—this is a favor?" Steve scoffed. "Some kind of I.O.U. for Fury to cash in at a later date?"

"I don't know."

"Agent Romanoff."

She shook her head, repeating firmly, "I don't know. What I do know is that everything I told you was true. The Syndicate is indirectly responsible for thousands of deaths. And within six months, S.H.I.E.L.D. will have enough evidence to take down the entire ring."

It was a small comfort. Steve already regretted his decision. He could have saved them, he could have. But he didn't. He didn't even insist; what kind of person did that make him?

"Within six months, those people will be dead," he hissed.

She lifted her chin. "You did what you had to do," she said logically.

"Maybe," he countered, shaking his head. "But you made the choice for me."

Her mouth opened. It closed. And she didn't answer him. But that didn't mean she didn't have an answer.

"What do you want me to say, Cap?" she asked tiredly, and the Black Widow faded away as her eyes fluttered and her arms came to rest at her sides again.

Steve couldn't pretend to know what she was thinking. But he could tell when he was being placated. He'd been angry, but now he was furious. Since the moment she'd called him up to be her partner on this job, Natasha had been carefully manipulating the truth to suit her ends. She took command of the mission so that she had a justified reason to keep the facts from him, she told him as little as possible about it because she knew he wouldn't have approved, and then when something didn't go precisely to plan, all she had to do to tip him back into obedience was remind him that the success of their mission relied on his complete cooperation.

That moment he'd thought he'd lost control of the situation? It wasn't then. He'd been played from the start. And when he finally saw through her schemes, Natasha treated him like another obstacle to work around, rather than a friend she respected enough to be straight with.

So he said something he couldn't take back, if only to feel like he had some control in their partnership.

"I want you to say that I don't have to see you again," he answered at last. "Because I don't think I can look at you without feeling sick to my stomach."

Steve didn't wait for an answer. Instead, he strapped his shield onto his back, turned on his heel, and boarded the quinjet, alone.

Penn Quarter, Washington D.C.

December 25, 2013

"Ugh."

Mal usually loved Chinese takeout, but today it wasn't comforting. With a sigh, she pushed her half-empty carton of Szechuan bean curd across her desk. She glanced up at the handwritten reminder to herself posted on the wall.

NO FOOD IN THE OFFICE. I'M NOT KIDDING.

She flipped it off. It was her own dumb rule anyway.

Mal hadn't been planning on anything exciting for Christmas when she first moved to DC. She didn't have the extra cash required to buy a plane ticket home to Hawaii—which she'd done the year before, anyway, so she didn't feel bound by familial obligations this year beyond chatting with her parents on the phone that morning—nor did she have the peace of mind to leave the city to head up north to Westchester.

Still, she'd been looking forward to hanging out with Steve. After their field trip to the Air and Space Museum, he was called into work, came back after a week, was called in yet again, before returning to DC only a few days before the holiday. And out of the blue, he called her up and asked if they could exchange gifts on Christmas. Naturally, she agreed. The rest of her coworkers were busy with their own loved ones and had no time to worry themselves with her loneliness.

Excitedly, she'd actually cleaned up her apartment—which had been beginning to look like an episode of Hoarders; something she found bizarre considering she was rarely home to mess it up—dusted off her turntable and record collection, and bought a whole mess of junk food.

But then the completely expected happened. She got a text on Christmas Eve, apologizing because he got called in and he didn't know when he'd be back, so it was probably best that they cancel their plans.

It was disappointing, but again unsurprising. So she told him not to worry about it and resigned herself to a quiet day in.

Despite her resignation, Mal was bored. She almost took a jog to the park, but the bitter wind buffeted her back into her warm apartment when she opened the door. She could have called her parents again—she knew they wouldn't mind—but her mother had enthusiastically informed her that they were going to a Christmas party that evening as her father made annoyed sounds in the background, so she didn't want to bother them. Neither Fitz nor Simmons were picking up their phones, so she assumed they were up in the air.

She spun around in her swivel chair, watching the ceiling fan spin without spinning. She could always work. She shook her head; Mal promised herself she wasn't going to work on Christmas.

Her computer chirped. She looked at the screen, a huge grin splitting on her face as she opened the invitation.

It was someone she hadn't talked to for far too long.

"Kitty!" she squealed as soon as her old friend's face appeared on her screen. She was a year younger than Mal, but they had been roommates as long as Kitty had been at the mansion. "Merry—" she abruptly caught herself, "—Hanukkah," she finished lamely.

Kitty shook her head, laughing. "Hanukkah was two weeks ago, but thanks. Merry Christmas to you! Did you have a good day?"

She shrugged. "Eh. It was boring."

"You should've come up here!" she exclaimed. In a moment of perfect timing, Mal heard a prepubescent shriek followed by what sounded like a Christmas tree crashing through a window. Without a beat, Kitty said, "We had an exciting day."

When she made no move to check on the kids, Mal tentatively asked, "Aren't you, like, in charge? Shouldn't you make sure no one got hurt?"

She rolled her eyes, acting way too nonchalant for a teacher. "Pete's got it. Or, at least, he better get it or I will strangle—" she twisted her hands around an invisible neck, "—someone."

There was a pause. "So, how's teaching?"

A glare from Kitty was enough to throw her into gales of laughter.

When her giggles subsided, Kitty answered the question seriously. "I love teaching," she said with a smile, "and I love the kids, but that doesn't mean I don't want to fall through the center of the earth sometimes. There's this one little punk, Gordon… I swear to god, the murder will be just."

Mal bit her index finger to keep from laughing again. "I miss you."

"You wouldn't have to miss me if you'd come up for Christmas," Kitty said in a sing-song voice.

"I don't have a car."

"There are no other modes of transportation, so point taken."

Mal stuck her tongue out. Kitty blew a raspberry back. They tended to regress to their preteen years whenever they got the chance to speak.

"I'm working tomorrow," she explained. "I would have had to leave today, which wouldn't be too bad if I had a car. I already figured this out with Hank."

Kitty snapped her fingers. "Right. That's why I called you."

"You mean it wasn't for my crackling wit?"

Kitty ignored her. "Hank wanted to talk to you. I set up a secure connection so your bigoted spy-people employers can't see you talking with mutants."

Mal frowned. It was a point of major contention between them; one of the only things they ever fought about outside of bathroom related drama. Like her surname suggested, Kitty was a proud person. And she thought it was wrong of Mal to compromise a huge part of identity for what she saw as 'just a job'. Mal had been able to convince her that it wasn't just a job, but beyond supporting her decision, Kitty took every chance she got to slander S.H.I.E.L.D. Mal heaved a heavy sigh and tried, for the hundredth time, to explain it to her, "They're not bigoted. Spy-people, yes. Bigoted, no."

"You said you'd get fired if they knew you were a mutant."

"I said I might be fired. It's just as likely that I'm just being paranoid."

The lie was so blatant that she almost laughed after saying it. She didn't believe that for a second. Prejudices ran deep under the surface; even if S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't seem to dislike mutants, Mal wasn't going to compromise her life's work on an off-chance.

Kitty knew she didn't believe her own words and scoffed. "Mal. You have two laptops, two cell phones, and two tablets. You live in an apartment with two bedrooms so you can put all of your secrets in one of them. You're literally leading a double life."

She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her forehead. "Are we really doing this right now?" Her eyes opened as she smiled weakly and reminded her, "It's Christmas."

Kitty pointed at herself. "Jewish."

Before the argument escalated any further, Hank interrupted from off screen to say to Kitty, "I believe Piotr is looking for you. Jessica got stuck in the crawlspace and they need someone to retrieve her."

Kitty rolled her eyes. "Work, work, work," she sighed and began handing the laptop to Hank.

"Wait," Mal blurted out. They couldn't end on such a tense note. "We're cool, right?"

Kitty blinked before she smiled. "We're always cool, Sal," she said softly, laughing when Mal's face soured at the use of her mutant name. "I'll call you again on New Year's, okay?"

"Sounds great. Love you."

"Love you, too." And then she was gone and Hank's blue face replaced it.

Objectively, Mal could see how his appearance could frighten some people, but she found it comforting. When she first met him as a little girl, she'd been curious, but never afraid. However, she did still flush with embarrassment when she recalled stroking the blue fur on the hand he offered to her before solemnly informing him that he felt like her favorite teddy bear.

"Were you two fighting again?" asked Hank as he settled into Kitty's vacated chair.

Mal smiled grimly. "Just like old times."

He sighed. "Pride is easy to have when you have nothing to lose," he said knowingly, and she remembered that he'd once been in the same boat as she was now: a young scientist working for a government agency hiding a career-ending secret.

"I don't think she'll ever understand me," she replied quietly.

"No, I don't think she will."

They were both quiet for a moment. Then she forced herself to smile and ask, "So, what's up?"

He cleared his throat. "Right. Did you get the email I sent you?"

Mal slowly began checking under the huge piles of files on her desk. She knew her tablet was around there somewhere. "Did you send it today?"

"Yes."

"Haven't looked at my email." With a quiet 'aha!', she dragged her tablet out from a file folder. "I promised myself I wouldn't work today, so no phones or email."

"Oh. Well, this is a bit work related, if that's alright."

"It's more than alright. I'm pulling my hair out over here."

Mal had a work email and a personal email; obviously, the X-Men used her personal email to contact her. She sifted through a few forwarded articles from her father, a collection of cats wearing Christmas sweaters from her mother, and found his email nestled between a photo of her parents at their party and an email from her father that just read, 'get me out of the goddamn party. I don't care that you're four thousand miles away.'

Her father was not a sociable man.

"Okay…" she drawled, opening up the file. "Let's see here… 'Subject: Leech'," she read out loud, confused. "Hank, what—"

"An extra Christmas present for you, my dear," he interrupted, his eyes full of amusement. "I think you'll find it quite interesting."

Mal raised an eyebrow. "May I?"

He spread out his palms as if to say, 'Go ahead.'

There was a date at the top of the next document. "'3/17/2005.'" She'd still been living at the mansion. "'DOB: 1/29/1993. Height: 5'1". Weight: 100 lbs. Blood pressure…"

She trailed off with a blank look. "Keep going," he prompted.

She did. "'Mutation: remote negation of mutant abilities'," she continued, crinkling her forehead. "The hell does that… oh."

The next page was just a photo: a green-skinned mutant reaching out her hand to the boy. The closer she was to him, the whiter her skin was. He leeched the color right out of her skin.

"Leech," she gasped. "Oh, my god."

Hank chuckled. "I thought you'd enjoy it."

"Hank, you give the best Christmas presents ever."

"Oh, did you like the socks?"

Mal stuck her socked foot up to the camera. "I love the socks." Her attention went back to the tablet. "This looks like an experiment. They weren't…"

She didn't need to finish. Like most mutants, Mal had a healthy fear of nonconsensual experimentation, and Hank knew that.

"Nothing as nefarious as you're thinking," he assured her.

"Strapped to a metal table in an underground cave with Russian scientists probing around your insides," she supplied promptly with hand gestures.

Hank shook his head. "No. Worthington Industries funded the project. They wanted to create a 'cure', so to speak."

"A 'cure'," repeated Mal blankly. "For… for mutants?"

"Obviously, it didn't work." Of course not. She hadn't seen 'Mutant-Be-Gone' next to the cough syrup at the pharmacy. "My point is, Worthington provided for the boy. They couldn't have people digging around and finding reasons to press charges for crimes against humanity."

"Still…" she trailed off. The kid was bald and pale, dressed in a blinding white shirt and equally blinding white pants. He didn't look happy. "They didn't even write his name down."

Hank smiled softly. "Jimmy, I believe."

"Jimmy," she repeated, smiling as well. "Short for James?"

"I don't know."

"I like James. It's a good name."

"I suppose."

Mal took a deep breath through her nose. "Okay," she said. She wouldn't feel too guilty for indulging herself in his biology. After all, Mal had never met a mutation she didn't love. "Okay. What does this mean? 'Remote negation'. He didn't have to touch someone to take their powers. So… airborne? Could be pheromones."

Stroking his chin in thought, Hank replied, "I'm not sure it's accurate to say he could 'take' powers, or even negate them. Most accurately, I would say it's remote gene suppression."

"But that would suggest the existence of one universal 'X-gene'," countered Mal.

"That is the prevailing theory, isn't it?"

"I haven't been able to prove it," she said. "Granted, I have, like, seven samples of mutant DNA to work with, but still. I've been cross-referencing them since September and I haven't found jack. No," she interrupted herself as she thought back. "I did discover that I'm distantly related to Scott. Way distantly, but enough to bother him about it."

"I'm sure he'll love that," Hank noted dryly before returning to their conversation. "Have you talked to the Professor about this? Because I'm not exactly a geneticist."

"You're doing fine," Mal assured him absently. "If Jimmy can 'leech' powers or whatever, that means that his 'trait' can identify mutants. I mean, I'm assuming nothing happens to non-mutants when they're around him. By that logic…" she paused. Her thoughts took a moment to arrange themselves.

"By that logic, mutants do have something in common, regardless of how different we all are." She sat back in her chair. "So maybe we do have the same gene; it's just not in the same place. And if Jimmy's mutation can identify the specific gene in every mutant, then I can use that to isolate the accelerated healing gene in my DNA!"

Mal almost squealed in delight. "Hank, where's this kid now?"

Abruptly, his face fell. Mal's hopes fell with it.

"It was the Brotherhood," said Hank quietly and that was all she needed to hear to know something horrible had happened. "They got word of a potential 'mutant cure' and…" He couldn't bring himself to finish as he shook his head solemnly.

"The boy was murdered in his bed; the facility was torched. Honestly, I'm amazed I could find anything at all."

She closed her eyes, heaving a deep breath in a poor attempt to rein in her rage.

Magneto.

Like every student at Xavier's school, Mal had grown up with stories about Erik Lehnsherr—the Holocaust survivor turned Nazi hunter turned CIA agent turned presidential assassin and so on and so forth. And she knew the professor never wanted his students to believe what history had decided; that Professor X was a hero and Magneto was a villain.

But they were only children. Everything was black and white back then. And it certainly didn't help that most of their other professors—namely Scott Summers and Logan—were so vocal in their prejudice against Magneto. No matter how he spun it, the children could never see him as the tortured extremist the Professor made him out to be. To them, he was either your boogeyman or your savior.

Regardless, no one had heard or seen him in over three years. The Professor had tried multiple times to find him using Cerebro with no success. It was like he'd dropped off the face of the earth and taken his Brotherhood of Mutants with him. By this point, the X-Men had all but retired. She was certain the last time the team had been deployed was when she was still in school.

Mal bit her thumbnail nervously. "Still no activity from the Brotherhood?" she asked quietly. Hank shook his head, his lips turning down. "That's good, right?" she ventured with a weak smile. "I mean, they are terrorists, after all…"

"It's not that simple."

She knew it wasn't. A huge group of mutants with a flair for the dramatic suddenly falling from the public eye was suspicious and likely insidious. Mal just hoped they weren't all strapped to metal tables in underground caves with Russian scientists probing their insides. No matter what problems she had with the Brotherhood, no one deserved that.

"Is someone knocking on your door?" he asked suddenly.

Mal cocked her head towards her door. "I doubt it. My plans fell through yesterday; hell, I haven't even talked to any people face-to-face today. Well, except for the delivery boy, who told me he was in a reggae-funk-fusion band and then invited me to one of his gigs. I'm honestly considering going to that—"

"Someone is definitely knocking on your door," said Hank quickly, before she could properly get into the intricacies of reggae-funk-fusion. "I'll let you go."

"Okay," she said. "Say 'hi' to everyone for me. Especially Logan, because he doesn't return any of my calls."

"Logan doesn't have a phone."

"Then who am I calling?" she wondered. She shook her head; the knocking was becoming incessant. "Okay, bye."

"Goodbye. And merry Christmas!"

"You, too."

Mal hurtled out of her office, sliding the rest of the way to her front door in her new woolen socks. When she yanked open her front door, she was panting slightly. So was Steve, standing there with his fist raised to knock again. His nose was bright red and there were snowflakes dusting his shoulders and hair.

"It's snowing!" she blurted out without so much as a 'hello'.

He seemed surprised by the exclamation. "It's been snowing for a while," he informed her.

"Oh," she said dumbly. She hadn't been looking outside. Mal rubbed the back of her neck. "I probably should have started with a greeting."

He smiled. "Maybe."

"Hey."

Steve laughed outright. "Hi."

"I wasn't expecting you." Usually, Steve was gone for a week at least.

"I texted you," he said unsurely. "And I called, but you didn't pick up."

Oops. Mal grimaced. "My bad. I cut myself off from work stuff today." Sort of. Her mind was still racing from her conversation with Hank, but she set that aside.

"Good," said Steve. "You work too much."

"That's rich, coming from you," she retorted, before she realized they were still conducting their conversation over her threshold. "Oh, God, sorry. Come in! The hell is wrong with me?"

"Thanks." Before she took his coat, he awkwardly thrust a thin rectangular present into her hands. She smiled; like her father, he wrapped his presents with the comics section of the newspaper.

"Don't get too excited," he warned her.

"Too late," she chirped.

No matter what his present was, it was really just enough that Steve was there at the time of year when Mal was acutely aware how far she was from home.

Basically, the plot is crazy. But if it comes down to it, MCU takes precedence over X-Men movie-verse. Period. From the beginning of this story, the X-Men movie-verse was only meant to enrich the MCU timeline, so I'm gutting the shit out of the X-Men movies and choosing the bits I liked best to fit into my story.

So, to make things clear: the events of X-Men, X2, and X-Men: The Last Stand did not happen. X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past did. The events of this story are (mostly) revised-timeline compliant. I haven't seen the Wolverine movies, but Logan's backstory (when he appears for real) comes from the movies, not the comics.

All that being said, there will be hints of the movies in my story. For example, in this chapter, I mentioned Leech, who appeared in X-Men: The Last Stand, before murdering him swiftly and without mercy.

Let me know if shit got too complicated because that is completely understandable. It barely makes sense in my head.

Edited 2018.